Cancer, heart disease vaccines by end of decade

Paul Burton, chief medical officer of Moderna, said on Saturday he believed the firm could offer vaccines for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years.

He said Moderna was in the process of developing cancer vaccines that target different tumour types, which they claim could save millions of lives.

“We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives,” Dr Burton told The Guardian this week.

“I think we will be able to offer personalised cancer vaccines against multiple different tumour types to people around the world.”

Dr Burton said the firm was also attempting to extend the mRNA technology behind the Covid-19 jab to develop vaccines for other infectious diseases.

“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology,” he said.

Studies into the vaccinations are showing “tremendous promise”, with some saying 15 years of progress was now in its final quarter after the astoundingly quick turnaround for and rollout of the Covid-19 jab.

But the scientists warned they’re going to continue to need mammoth financial investment to deliver on the promise.

Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said as the threat of war loomed it was important not to lose sight of the threat of a new pandemic.

“If you take a step back to think about what we are prepared to invest in during peacetime, like having a substantial military for most countries … Pandemics are as much a threat, if not more, than a military threat because we know they are going to happen as a certainty from where we are today,” he told the same publication.

“But we’re not investing even the amount that it would cost to build one nuclear submarine.”

Billions of dollars were thrown at the worldwide effort to develop and roll out a Covid-19 vaccine in record time, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing.

Budget papers last year showed payouts for Covid-19 vaccine injuries were set to explode more than 80-fold in Australia, projected to hit nearly $77 million by July next year.

The figure was quietly buried in the portfolio budget statement of Services Australia, the body in charge of administering the payout scheme, in a table detailing third-party payments from the agency “on behalf of other entities”.

The table revealed that in 2021-22, the Covid vaccine claims scheme paid out just $937,000 — which would work out to about 47 people if they each received the maximum tier-one amount of $20,000.

But in 2022-23, that amount is estimated to blow out to $76.9 million, equating to 3845 tier-one claims.

The compensation scheme, which is currently scheduled to end on April 17, 2024, allows Australians to claim for medical costs, lost wages or other expenses if they suffer an adverse reaction to a Covid vaccine.

Figures released earlier this month showed out of 2987 people to apply for compensation, only 59 were successful, with experts describing the rate of payouts as “absolutely pitiful”.

Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine was the last to be approved for use in Australia in 2021, after Pfizer–BioNTech, Oxford–AstraZeneca and Janssen. Pfizer — another mRNA vaccine — continues to be the leading choice for Australians under 60 years of age.