Cancer vaccines will have a pivotal moment in 2025

By Natasha Loder, Health editor, The Economist

After decades of disappointment, efforts to create vaccines that can stimulate the immune system to fight cancer are showing renewed promise. Breakthroughs are possible in the coming year. The optimism stems from advances in mrna technology and personalised medicine, and in particular from a melanoma vaccine called mrna-4157, developed by Moderna and Merck, that is performing well in trials. In 2025 the fda, America’s drugs regulator, could approve the vaccine. And in Britain the nhs’s Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, a tie-up with BioNTech, a pioneer of covid vaccines, aims to fast-track thousands of patients into trials for mrna-based personalised vaccines for colorectal, pancreatic and melanoma cancers.