Trend Technology 7: a vaccine synthesized around one patient's tumour mutations

Summary

Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines are the report's seventh emerging technology, built around the unique mutations of a single patient's tumour. Unlike drugs that attack cancer directly, these vaccines teach the immune system to recognize it. After diagnosis, doctors take tumour cells and sequence their mutations to find the antigens that mark those cells as foreign. An mRNA vaccine is then made to match that exact profile, instructing the immune system to recognize and respond to cells carrying those markers. If the cancer comes back, the body's defences are already primed. The report attributes the field's momentum to two decades of genomics research, sharply cheaper tumour sequencing and the mRNA infrastructure expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic.