Researchers Develop mRNA Vaccines with Possibility of Treating Cancer

Researchers have developed small circular mRNA vaccines with the promise of treating cancer.

The vaccines are “antigen-encoding RNA vaccines,” and they “elicit a potent, long-lasting tumor immunotherapy response with less toxicity than other treatments.” So-called “circRNA” treatments are targeted with the goal of improving on existing immunotherapy and vaccine approaches.

Guizhi (Julian) Zhu, whose lab led the research team, said that “traditional pathogen-based vaccines have numerous drawbacks that limit their benefits for treating cancer and chronic or preexisting infections. As COVID-19 demonstrated, mRNA vaccines avoid some of these drawbacks and can be very effective, but there is still much room for improvement.” His work focuses on engineering a “novel circular mRNA structure” that eliminates some of the issues with mRNA vaccines, like their limited biostability and how time-consuming they are to produce.

Zhu’s work demonstrates that “ircRNA has high loading capacity in nanocarriers and efficiently accumulates in lymph nodes and antigen-presenting cells, both of which are important to activate antigen-specific immune responses that are critical to fight against cancer as well as pathogenic infections.” He is undertaking a project now to further investigate the effectiveness of these vaccines against melanoma.

Additional projects are underway to apply circRNA for different uses. For instance, a “carrier that can deliver circRNA into lungs, possibly via a nasal spray,” is being worked on. This could hypothetically have use against the flu or COVID.