Do mRNA tumour vaccines herald a new revolution in cancer treatment?

Not long ago, a diagnosis of advanced cancer left doctors with little more than symptom control and hope. Over the course of a few of decades, however, that picture changed dramatically. Chemotherapy delivered the first meaningful survival gains, though at a steep cost in side effects, a cost later softened by a new generation of supportive drugs that made treatment safer and more tolerable. The mapping of the human genome then opened up an era of precision medicine, as whole-genome sequencing revealed mutations that could be directly targeted. Survival improved again, but a cure remained elusive: tumours kept finding new, resistant mutations to evade each targeted drug. It took a deeper understanding of the immune system to breach the next frontier: immunotherapy taught the body’s own defences to attack cancers once thought untreatable.