Imagine visiting your doctor for a routine checkup, and on top of the usual shots — the annual flu or COVID vaccine—your doctor asks if you’d like to be vaccinated for cancer. All cancer— lung, skin, colon, you name it — with just one mildly uncomfortable jab in the arm.
That scenario, which sounds like something out of science fiction, might be closer than you think. And it’s mostly thanks to the COVID vaccine – which in a few short years has become the highest-profile of the increasingly influential family known as mRNA vaccines.
Indeed, mRNA vaccines designed to treat cancer (among other diseases) “are quite realistic,” says Anna Blakney, an RNA researcher at the University of British Columbia.
And cancer is just the tip of the iceberg. Earlier this month, scientists Edo Kon and and Dan Peer from Tel Aviv University and the Israel Institute for Biological Research announced that they’d created a single dose vaccine that could effectively protect people from Yersinia pestis bacterium. Haven’t heard of it? That’s because it’s better known (at least in the Middle Ages) as the plague — a disease that still kills thousands in Asia and parts of Africa each year.