Issue Per-patient cost above $100,000 could confine the therapy to well-resourced health systems

Summary

The Dubai Future Foundation outlook names access as the central risk for personalized mRNA cancer vaccines. Early treatments cost more than $100,000 per patient. At that price, the vaccines could remain limited to people in well-resourced health systems, widening global gaps in cancer outcomes. The outlook suggests that shared neoantigen libraries and hybrid models mixing personalized and off-the-shelf vaccines could help balance cost, speed and specificity. Such approaches would particularly help health systems unable to run the whole sequencing, design and manufacturing chain themselves. The defining question for the next five years is whether these vaccines can be delivered at scale without making precision medicine a privilege instead of a standard of care.