Putin’s wish supposedly fulfilled: vaccine announced by the Kremlin is for everyone (and, apparently, for all cancers) at the beginning of 2025. Skeptical immunologists: “I don’t see any scientific article about this”.
Russia will have developed its own cancer vaccine and announced, last Sunday, that it will be bringing it to the public for free very soon.
The announcement was made by Andrey Kaprin, General Director of the Center for Medical Research in Radiology of the Russian Ministry of Health, in an interview with Russian radio Rossiya.
According to the agency, the new vaccine was created with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and is the result of collaborative efforts between several research centers.
Russia guarantees that the treatment will be free and available to all citizens. “It is scheduled to be released into general circulation at the beginning of 2025”, says the Russian agency controlled by the Kremlin.
The vaccine is of the type mRNA (messenger RNA), currently the target of hundreds of clinical trials around the world, revolutionized by research into vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic. It sends instructions to produce the Spike protein, which the virus needs to enter the body’s cells, so that the immune system then recognizes it as foreign and produces antibodies. In cancer cases, this process is adapted to help the immune system identify and attack cancer cells.
Preclinical trials have demonstrated its ability to suppress tumor growth and prevent metastasis, according to Alexander Gintsburg, Director of the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology.
A IA would have been useful to accelerate vaccine development, points out the official, who guarantees that AI-powered neural network calculations can reduce the time needed to create personalized vaccines so that the process can be completed in just one hour.
The unusual news comes at a time when several countries and companies are working to develop their own cancer vaccines. The fact that Russia supposedly got there first and announced the innovation so suddenly has left some skeptical scientists regarding the new vaccine.
“Until we see data from a clinical trial, there has to be skepticism about this“, sums up immunologist Kingston Mills, from Trinity College Dublin: “there is nothing in the scientific journals that you can see about this. That’s when you usually start reading, as a scientist, about a discovery.”
“I don’t see any articles about thisso I have nothing to base it on in terms of science”, he reinforces, remembering, however, that “the idea of a cancer vaccine is real”.
Last year, the UK government reached an agreement with BioNTecha German company specializing in vaccines, to launch clinical trials of “personalized cancer treatments” by 2030.
At the same time, pharmaceutical giants Modern e Merck Co are also developing experimental cancer vaccines.
“I think what doesn’t make sense is that it’s a vaccine for cancer — as we all know, there are several types of cancer,” the immunologist also recalls: “is this a universal vaccine for all cancers? I would be very skeptical of this. I don’t think it can be”, he warns.
“What is cancer? What is the antigen? Where is the clinical trial data? All of these are unanswered questions and we have not yet seen any of this data to be able to make a correct assessment”, asks the expert.
The Russian President Vladimir Putinwhich had already been very optimistic about progress on the cancer vaccine in February this year, has so far been unable to answer these questions.
Putin said only that the country was on the verge of creating “next-generation cancer vaccines and immunomodulatory drugs,” without specifying the types of cancer that would be targeted by the new injection treatment. “I hope that they will soon be effectively used as methods of individual therapy,” added the Russian leader, without going into details.
Tomás Guimarães, ZAP //
