Thread by @bopinion

The fight against Covid-19 looks particularly hopeless right now, with new variants threatening to make the pandemic worse before mass vaccination makes it better.

But some of the new vaccines offer hope — and not just that the pandemic will end trib.al/7GO3Z0X

It looks increasingly plausible that the same weapons we’ll use to defeat Covid-19 can also vanquish even grimmer reapers — including cancer, which kills almost 10 million people a year trib.al/7GO3Z0X

The most promising Covid vaccines use nucleic acids called mRNA.

They instruct the body to create the same proteins that wrap around the viral RNA of SARS-CoV-2. The immune system then familiarizes itself with the proteins ahead of potential infection trib.al/7GO3Z0X

This is mRNA’s bigger promise: It can tell our cells to make whatever protein we want.

That includes the antigens of many other diseases besides Covid-19 trib.al/7GO3Z0X

In its day-to-day function, mRNA takes instructions from the DNA in our cell nuclei.

Stretches of the genome are copied, which the mRNA carries into the cytoplasm, where little cellular factories called ribosomes use the information to churn out proteins trib.al/7GO3Z0X

BioNTech and Moderna shortcut this process by first figuring out what protein they want.

Then they look at the sequence of amino acids that makes this protein. From that they derive the precise instructions the mRNA must give trib.al/7GO3Z0X

This process can be relatively fast, which is why it took less than a year to make the vaccines, a pace previously unimaginable.

It’s also genetically safe — mRNA can’t go back into the nucleus and accidentally insert genes into our DNA trib.al/7GO3Z0X

To kill a malignant tumor today, you generally zap it with radiation or chemicals, damaging lots of other healthy tissue in the process.

The better way would be to train the immune systems of individual patients against each genetically-unique tumor trib.al/7GO3Z0X

That’s a perfect job for mRNA:

1️⃣Find the antigen
2️⃣Get its fingerprint
3️⃣Reverse-engineer the cellular instructions to target the culprit
4️⃣Let the body do the rest

trib.al/7GO3Z0X

Take a look at the pipelines of Moderna and BioNTech. They include drug trials for cancers of the:

🔴Breast
🔴Prostate
🔴Skin
🔴Pancreas
🔴Brain
🔴Lung

As well as vaccines against everything from influenza to Zika and rabies trib.al/7GO3Z0X

Progress, admittedly, has been slow. That’s partly because investors in this sector must put up oodles of capital and then wait for more than a decade, first for the trials, then for regulatory approvals.

In the past, too few were in the mood trib.al/7GO3Z0X

Covid-19 may turbo-charge all these processes. The pandemic has led to a grand debut of mRNA vaccines and their definitive proof of concept.

mRNA should have no problems getting money, attention or enthusiasm — from investors, regulators and policymakers trib.al/7GO3Z0X