The Covid Vaccine Is Fueling A Race For All Kinds Of Cures

It's the technology that made it possible to quickly develop the COVID vaccine, and now researchers and drug makers are racing to use the same technique for other illnesses, including the big one to treat cancers. Before we dive into that, maybe we should take a second to freshen up on just what m RNA is and why it's such a big deal. Most traditional vaccines, like for flu or for measle months work by injecting a weekend or dead strain of those viruses or a piece of them into your arm.

Your body's immune system to text the intruder and a tax it and makes antibodies to fight off the disease if you're ever exposed to it for real. Now, m RNA vaccines are different mRNA is really the middleman, and it brings the code for each gene to a machine in our cell that reads the RNA and produces a protein from that code. That's Dr Drew Wiseman, a vaccine researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his colleague doctor Catalan Caroco develop the mr ANDA technology used in

the COVID shots. I'll talk more with Dr Wiseman in a moment. M RNA, that middleman, he called it, is part of your body's genetic structure. Its job is to deliver instructions to yoursels. It tells them to make certain proteins you need to live. An mRNA vaccine works by injecting m RNA into your body that's been programmed to tell yourselves to make proteins that match the proteins found in the real virus, like the spike proteins sticking up out of the coronavirus that makes those photos of it

looks so scary. Your body's immune system sees this foreign material and makes anti bodies that can protect you later if you're exposed to real COVID. M RNA research has been happening for decades and a lot of scientists made important contributions, but one nagging problem kept getting in the way of an m RNA vaccine. The body was attacking the m RNA itself before it could deliver its message.

This is where doctors Wiseman and Carrico come in. Their breakthrough was to modify the RNA so your immune system sees it as harmless and lets it do its job. That opened the door to the COVID vaccine and using mRNA for all kinds of other potential treatments and cures. Their work won them a three million dollar Science Award, and they're mentioned as possible contenders for a Nobel Prize. None of this may have happened if it weren't for a chance encounter. Wiseman and Kariko had at the photo

copy machine back in the nine es. She had been working on it for around ten years and nobody was interested. And we met and we started working together, and people still weren't interested. But we were able to develop a new way of working on RNA, and that led to the development of nucleus side modified mRNA that people finally became interested in. As Dr Wiseman and I got talking, I asked him why mRNA research was such a hard sell. RNA had been studied, it had been put into clinical trials,

and it had failed. So when Katie and I started working on it, we developed new ways of making RNA therapy work better. So is it an overstatement to say that if you had not had a fateful encounter at the copying machine, we might not have had the coronavirus vaccine as quickly as we did. Um, Yeah, I think that's true. That is pretty fascinating. Do you ever just sort of look back on that moment and think, my goodness, what if? Yeah, my wife and kids point that out

to us all of the time. And then when the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan, China, I believe you were working on a flu vaccine and then you sort of switched right because you saw a great promise in this. Exactly, we were working on flu and other vaccines, and when the COVID nineteen virus came out, we saw that as a potential difficulty for the world, and we switched to

working on COVID nineteen. So you actually saw this and said, wait a minute, this is going to be a very big problem for the world, kind of like and went overstated, but the world needs me, I guess so. I mean, I'm kind of too humble to say something like that. But when I saw the death and the disease come out of Wuhan, China, my labs started working on it with the idea of that this could be a really

bad thing and we needed to do something. And how quickly did you realize that the work that you had been doing for years was really very well suited for this particular virus. So it was really immediate because we saw this as a brand new, unknown virus that was having worldwide potential damage and we needed to do something, and the RNA that Katie and I had developed appeared like a great potential way to address it. Now, the

UK has approved defineser Beyonce vaccine for use. That makes Britain the first Western country to license a coronavirus vacts. The fate of FISS COVID vaccine aur livees in the hands of regulators who will be scrutinizing safety and efficacy. Dating Certainly, everything that's been talked about from the FISER and the Maderna vaccine as well up to date has been very positive and leaves me optimistic about this vaccine

coming down the pipeline. So it was the goal now to try to come up with a vaccine against coronavirus that is the one that will attack them all exactly. So we and others have been working on vaccines that work against any virus that suddenly appears in the world. Let me ask you about the business side of this.

So you paint a picture of a platform that could quickly address a new disease, But the way the pharmaceutical industry has worked is that they wanted to keep a pretty close hold and newly developed therapies because they spend a lot making them and they want to profit from them. Do you see this as the sort of thing where scientists and drug companies would actually share, or that there would be proprietary versions of each of these platforms that

different manufacturers keep close to the best. So that brings up a so see a economic worldview order that scientists like me, we have a view that that we need to develop something that can be rapidly used to treat the world. How the world deals with that is a whole separate and difficult thing. Is that something that you discuss with your colleagues. We talked about it all the time, sometimes not so kindly, about how the world sometimes deals

with it. Something that that has been central to my really life since I was a tiny child is to be able to develop therapies that can be used quickly across the world and by the entire world to treat and address any disease, any new change in life, change in the world that happens. It's important that it's available to the entire world to apply to the world's population, not just a US or Europe based approach that can

be applied by wealthy nations and pharmaceutical companies. So I've spent my life making therapies available to the world and helping the world to develop it and apply it to their particular diseases. But when you look at the distribution, say of the coronavirus vaccine, it has been very uneven around the world, and it's along predictable lines where rich countries get it in less rich countries off and don't yees.

So that's what we've worked on. The minute the vaccine hit, I had already been working in Thailand and they came to me and said, we're worried that any vaccine that's developed won't make it to us very quickly. So I work with them to make their own vaccine and their own company centers to be able to produce vaccine to give to their population and surrounding populations. And we've done the same thing in Africa, and we're doing the same

thing and all disadvantaged reasons of the world. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. This was just fascinating. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed talking with you. When the Big take is back, I talked with Bloomberg Healthcare reporter Riley Griffin. She explains how we got from Dr wise Men's research to big farmer producing billions of doses of COVID vaccine in record time.

I'm happy to be here with Bloomberg reporter Riley Griffin. Riley, there are a lot of companies that see a big future in m R and A treatments, and you have written a fascinating story about one of the big ones. Visor. We're all familiar with Viser now because of the vaccine, and it's an interesting story because before the pandemic, Fiser

had become something of sort of a staid company. They're huge, they have a ton of money, and they used that money to buy other drug companies instead of making their own. But COVID changed that. COVID changed that absolutely. I would say there was a shift right before COVID. Let me take you back to Albert Borla takes the helm of

viser Um. He is the new CEO, and he ultimately had a new vision for viser So this company that had become quite a conglomerate with many of these big blockbuster drugs that had gone off patent, think Viagra, think lipatore. It hadn't had innovation in quite some time, and it was looking to be more like the nimble biotechs that were spurring a lot of investor interest, real growth stories. And so Albert Borla had hived off the off patent

generic drug unit and sold it into another company. And ultimately, you know, they were looking for science and that was early hits. Albert bolas at a helm and they have to decide what to do next. And they had already been looking at these mRNA vaccines, but they weren't looking at it for COVID. They've already been working on it precisely.

Wes so back in Visor clinches this deal with a German company called bion Tech, and bion Tech was a player in m RNA messenger RNA and Fiser had turned to buy on Tech to work on an mRNA vaccine for flu. Why did they think that it would transfer naturally from flu to the coronavirus, which is a different kind of virus. So there are a couple of benefits to messenger RNA when it comes to vaccination, especially for

infectious disease UM. One is that messenger RNA ultimately allows the body to be its own vaccine factory and create those antibodies to thwart whatever the threat may be, in this case COVID and so in the sense it compresses the timeline. But also even more critically, the time to manufacture mRNA is much shorter. So other vaccines require you too, especially for flu. For example, you grow flu vaccines in eggs.

Um you can grow them in cells. There's there's a cultivation process, and that takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of resources. You don't have that here. You create the messenger RNA and nothing needs to grow. It goes straight into the body and so UM you can also adapt messenger RNA quite quickly one time, Albert Borla described it to me kind of like a VCR player. You put the cassette in the tape. I'm dating myself there. You put the tape in and you can take it

out and plug something else. The point being, Messenger RNA is a really great tool if you want to compress the production timeline, and that's what we needed in January of money. So now, Fiser, you know how the story went.

They created this vaccine that was used millions millions people around the world, and then when the different variants came out, they tried to to match it using, as you describe, the technology that allows them to kind of quickly readjust it with you know, some kind of degree of efficacy. Many folks know that this was a massive success. Billions of doses shipped around the world to more than a hundred and eighty countries, but few people know that this

vaccine doubled their revenue in a single year. That was This year, Viser is expected to make more than a hundred billion in revenue off of the vaccine. More than half of that will come from the vaccine coupled with the anti viral treatment that they've made for COVID paxilovid. So the COVID business is more than half their business now. But and this is an interesting thing in your story.

This creates a big problem because they are so geared now towards coronavirus, and you know, let's all hope a year from now we're not going to be talking about this as often as we are now. They need to do something else, and so they've sort of decided this is their future for all kinds of other diseases. Absolutely, and they're under pressure Wall Street. I mean this year, I think this is going to be their most successful

year on record. Their stock is down and that's because the fears that they just can't you do it again, like it was one trick ponies sort of things. They're victim of their own success and investors want to see visibility into the future of their earnings potential. So what are they going to do? So Fiser would say their messenger are in a strategy is a big part of their future. They are continuing to work with BioNTech on flu that could come to market as soon as next year,

perhaps the year after if successful. Is it only that the mrn A flu shot would be quicker to produce so you get like a better assessment of which flu is coming for us that year, or is it that it's also more effective as of accin The latter is the biggest question. So we're pretty certain that condensing that production time is gonna position us better. That is a bet that Fightser is making. It's also about that Maderna

is making I bet that Maderna has made prior to fight. Maderna, of course, is the other very big manufacturer of the coronavirus. You might have heard its name. Yeah, that is really the first up to bat. That is the first real trial of messenger RNA as a platform after the COVID vaccine, so highly anticipated. Your question as to whether it will be more effective, I can't tell you. Only the data will,

and we are watching for that data. One of the questions that always comes up around drug companies is that they spend a ton of money to develop these treatments that are great benefit of the war old, and you know, rich countries and rich people tend to get them in

less rich countries and people tend to not. The conditions in which we've seen the COVID nineteen vaccines distributed are unique to date governments have been the large purchasers Fiser Moderna to they've priced the products differently for low, middle and high income countries. I think there's a real question of what happens after we switch to a commercial market,

and that is the plan next year. The plan next year is that the US government will no longer pay for COVID nineteen vaccines, let alone other COVID treatments, and that this will shift to ensures and the more traditional healthcare system in which we all get our drugs. Once you shift to that commercial market, I think there's a real question as to how these companies will price the products, what that will mean in terms of access, what that will mean in terms of global distribution, and where the

innovation really ultimately goes. Riley, thanks so much. This is really terrific. Of course, thanks for having me. Coming up next, the m RNA treatments we could see in the future with Bloomberg's chief medical writer, Robert Langreth. We talked to Dr Drew Wiseman about the future of m RNA technology and Riley Griffin about what big companies like Fightser are

doing to try to develop it. So next I wanted to check in with Bloomberg's chief medical writer Robert Langreth, and asked him what new cures can we expect to

see coming soon? So the way you have to look at this is, you know, at the beginning of a new therapeutic area, you know, it sort of looks like, you know, endless possibilities, and then it takes years and years of research to figure out, you know, which are those possibilities, Which is our therapeutic possibilities are you know, really going to pan out with practical therapies that have

advantages over previous generations of therapies. So we're kind of for m RNA, we're kind of at the endless possibility stage, and we're still like doing the research to filter down to figure out, like, which of those things are you know, are really gonna work out in terms of a big

deal in terms of practical therapeutics. That's a really interesting point because one of the things that we were hearing when we were having our conversations was that mrn A allowed the COVID vaccine to be developed much more quickly than other vaccines, and it was able to sort of short circuit the usual very lengthy process. Um. So you seem to be saying that that won't necessarily be true when they try to apply that same process to other diseases. Well,

so here's what I would say. I would say that, you know, one of the clear and chief advantages of m RNA over other types of therapeutic anti vaccine approach is one of the clear advantages is in sort of the speed of manufacturing and how quickly you can adjust that. Now, obviously, you know, the pandemic highlighted one of m RNA's chief advantages, which is just manufacturing something fast and kind of adjusting

on the fly. And it's not so clear yet how important that advantage will be in you know, other non emergency situations that the pandemic proved. One area that m RNA will definitely work for is vaccines, and so that sort of d risk to some extent other similar infectious disease vaccine areas has suggests that, you know, there's nothing stopping this from working in infectious disease anti viral vaccines, and so that d risk other antiviral vaccines in terms of m RNA. When you say d risk, what do

you mean? What is the risk? Here's what I mean by D risk. Basically, it took some of the risk out of developing other m RNA vaccines. For infectious disease vaccines, it showed m RNA can definitively work, can succeed and be effective foreign infectious viral disease. When you say risk, do you mean that the risk that you spend a lot of years and a ton of money and you come up without a treatment. Yes, it just might not work. There are other efficacy barriers that are just different from

infectious diseases. For COVID, we kind of we knew kind of what the best thing to attack was pretty much right off the bat, despite protein that stuck up from the service, that was a thing we wanted to generate an immune response against. Now, for cancer vaccines, and you're trying to stimulate the body into generating an immune response that targets cancer cells and kills them. That's what you're trying to do, and that's why it's called cancer vaccines.

And it's been this really promising area that's never quite worked out in a big way and you know, turned out to be very very hard. So one of the things about cancer, of course, is people think about we're going to have a moonshot to cure cancer. But cancer isn't one disease, it's many diseases. Does m r and A hold any advantage in trying to treat many different kinds of cancers in a way that exist instinc treatments do. Yeah.

So one of the most interesting areas that is being tested with m RNA and cancer is personalized cancer vaccines. And this is an area that play that's still in a relatively early stages of testing and both Maderna and bion Techno working on it, but this is an area that kind of plays into the strengths of m RNA

and the ability to manufacture things quickly. So for personalized cancer vaccines, you're actually taking samples of patients own tumors and developing vaccines that would stimulate, uh, the immune system

attack characteristics of patients own tumors. This is like the personalized vaccines, and the manufacturing has to go fast, and that's something that can be done with m RNA because m RNA the technology just allows kind of quick manufacturing of individualized mRNA constructs of the pieces of m RNA that are using the vaccines, and that's just something that technology enables and it's one of the problems in developing personalized cancer vaccines that the main facturing is very bespoke

uh and individualized, and that's hard to do with previous technologies that were the production process is a bit slower. So is that something that is showing promise in the laboratory and that actually could go into production sooner? Is that still in the early testing phases? That is in

the clinical trials right now? Both BioNTech and my Maderna bi on Tech, for example, as a partnership with roche as working on personalized cancer vaccines and melanoma and colorectal cancer and that's in the second stage of human trials. And Maderna is also working on personalized cancer vaccines. Right So we talked about cancer, which is showing promise. What other diseases are Pharmaceutical companies looking to urna to possibly treat cancer, infectus disease and like vaccines, those are like

the furthest along and the most prominent merk. In August, they said they would spend as much as three point seven five billion to work on vaccines and cancer therapies with a company called Orna Therapeutics, and they're developing this like next generation technology called circular RNA, So there's a couple of companies trying that. Like rare rare genetic diseases

is another big area. There's are diseases you probably like, you know, names you haven't heard of, that you know, affect a small number of people, but you know often don't have good therapies, and if you can get something to work, uh, you know, you could charge a very high price, and patients are in desperate for treatments, and there's a lot of these rare diseases. I would say rare diseases is probably the third area that ARENA is looking very promising. And but I can't say, you know,

there's a single disease that sticks out there. Test people are testing trying a lot of different rare diseases right now. So when you look down the road five years from now, ten years from now, to the extent that you can do, you think that RNA treatments are going to be transformative, that they're going to really change the way drugs are made and diseases are treated. Yeah, so here's the situation

kind of right now as I see it. There's definitely going to be a number of vaccine results from other types of RNA, m r and A vaccines coming out in the next few years, and flu being the first one.

Will definitely get a better sense of like how effective is this and what are the advantages disadvantages versus other vaccine technologies and more mature vaccine areas such as influence and such as uh there's another respiratory disease called r s V. So vaccines will have a clear sense of cancer within five years, will have a better sense of

are these personalized cancer vaccines? Are they working well? We'll definitely have a bunch of results, will kind of have a much better sense of that the rare diseases in m RNA, the rare you know, genetic diseases, that's still kind of wild card. It's really hard to know how long that's going to take the play out. But what I would say is that infectious disease viral vaccines, that's the one thing that has proof of principle right now, and the other areas they still need to prove it.

Many things to doctor Drew Weissman, as well as Bloomberg's own Riley Griffin and Robert Langrith. You can find Riley's full piece of out Fiser's next act over at Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take, the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the i

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west Kosova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.