Roger-Luc Chayer (Image : AI / Gay Globe)
March 2020, a global alert and an international public health crisis. A new virus emerged and spread at lightning speed. Businesses were shut down, entire countries were closed, and people were confined to their homes, not to control them — let’s set aside conspiracy theorists of all kinds — but rather to slow the spread of the virus in order to preserve, as much as possible, medical systems and hospital capacity and, at the same time, the global economy, while a vaccine was being developed.
In December 2020, the first COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination campaigns arrived, bringing some relief against this virus that caused millions of deaths worldwide, in proportions comparable to the Spanish flu of the early 20th century.
What we did not know, however, was that it was not only an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19, but also a biotechnology platform that would, over time, contribute to the development of medical treatments for several other health conditions, including some of the most serious.
L’ARN messager : une plateforme médicale en pleine expansion
Messenger RNA (mRNA technology) is not currently used as a fully validated “universal treatment” for many diseases, but rather as a medical innovation platform that was accelerated by COVID-19 vaccines and is now being explored in several medical directions.
The most advanced and most studied areas are first of all cancer treatments. We are mainly talking about therapeutic mRNA vaccines, designed to teach the immune system to recognize and attack tumor cells. Clinical trials are ongoing or advanced for melanoma, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, kidney cancer, and certain virus-related cancers.
In some cases, these approaches are being tested alongside existing immunotherapies in order to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence.
Another major field concerns infectious diseases. mRNA is being used to develop new vaccines or improve existing vaccines against seasonal influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, hepatitis B, HIV, and even certain parasitic infections such as malaria. The key advantage here is rapid design and adaptation to viral variants.
There is also more exploratory research in rare diseases and genetic disorders. The goal is not yet to “treat” these diseases in a standard way, but to temporarily deliver missing or deficient proteins in certain metabolic disorders or genetic conditions. These approaches remain largely experimental medicine.
A more recent focus involves certain inflammatory diseases and autoimmune diseases, where researchers are trying to use mRNA to modulate the immune response, but this is still at the preclinical stage or in early clinical studies.
Medical research has evolved significantly thanks to work on mRNA technology, and things are advancing rapidly, with results being reported every month. In a sense, and despite the devastating impact of COVID-19, if the virus had not emerged, we would probably not be where we are today in the field of modern medicine and biomedical research.
Should we be glad about this? Share your opinion in the comments below this page.
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