RNA Covid vaccine was initially ‘developed for oncology use and was already in phase 2’

RNA Covid vaccine was initially ‘developed for oncology use and was already in phase 2’

it’s now in an age where we sometimes wonder about uh uh the how far AI can go well in the field of cancer research it seems as though it can help tailor make vaccines vaccines for cancer are still uh uh in their very early stages yet uh researchers have found ways of combining RNA and artificial intelligence to pinpoint what’s needed in each different patient well one of those working on this is Dr moaz Ben Ali Franco Tunisian thank you for being with us here on France 24 thank you for your invitation you you split your time between the lab and patients yes I’m specialized i am medical director and uh researcher in the field of anti-cancer drug development my first task is to develop protocols and anti-cancer drug to manage patients with cancer cuz vaccines for cancer it’s still the dawn right now of the age isn’t it to be honest it’s not a hot topic it’s not a new things for us because we spended a lot of time now for more than one decades working on this subject we should differentiate between two kind of vaccine the therapeutic vaccine and this is the vaccine that you are mentioning as tailored for or personalized or precision treatment for patients with cancer and the conventional vaccine and we have already approved a conventional vaccine against cervvic cancer for example today it’s about another thing the the therapeutic vaccine is a vaccine that we can uh classify as a precision medicines precision drugs and as you are mentioning we are using technology like NGS next generation sequencing for transcriptto the RNA and we are using artificial intelligence to uh prepare a vaccine tailored to the patients uh what do you do you take uh their a sample from the patient and you’re able to pinpoint exactly what they have how does it work because I know certain types of cancer like for instance breast cancer there’s so many different types you can’t have a one-sizefits-all vaccine for breast cancer uh yes we can differentiate between the solid and immattolen tumor and here for this vaccine is in developing in several andication and several cancers and the idea is first of all to uh to sequence the uh genoma but also the transcriptto as you were mentioning the RNA of the tumor but also to take to get an idea to take a biopsy and to extract the T- cell of the patients and to try to boost them and drive them against the kind of RNA of the tumor and this is a tailored vaccine the idea is to boost the immunity of the person against the cancer and that that’s why I was differentiating between therapeutic vaccine so vaccine in the idea to beat a kind of tumor cells and the conventional how new is this strategy excuse me how new is this strategy fighting cancer we presented at ASCO uh the this this week the result of a phase two and uh I think that we will come uh soon to approve this kind of approach because this approach also is a copy of what we are doing with carti the shimmer antigen receptor lymphosy is this is the same idea we are taking the tea cells of the patients we are boosting them in the lab and we are rejecting them to the patients so The originator of the drug is the patient himself and we reinject after that the boosted T- cell to the patient himself so 5 years ago first COVID lockdown that’s when most of us including myself first heard of the concept of RNA sequencing for which enabled the fasttracking of these co vaccines at the time as an oncologist did you know that uh this was this was your path yes uh you should understand that the uh vaccine that we use it against COVID was developed first for oncology use and it was in phase two non small lung cancer and the idea of a kind of vaccine based on the mRNA is coming from the oncology field personally I was expecting such development for for covid-19 and I even speak about since March 2021 that in December we can get a vaccine at that time so the idea of mRNA vaccine is is something that we developed and we speak a lot or we are working a lot in labs and we start start to emerge with what we are publishing today as a result from our lab works so incredible strides uh Moyes Benali you’re in the private sector uh there is a lot of research though that’s funded thanks to governments and most notably the US government thanks to its National Institute of Health uh Europeans saying uh to US researchers come to this side of the Atlantic but a lot of scientists are saying “Wait we don’t have the money to right now to to uh to level up when it comes to the kind of funding that’s needed public funding that’s needed for some of this uh fundamental research your thoughts on the fact that you’re seeing these big budget cuts in the United States do they affect you over here in Europe?” Uh at 100% i can tell told you that the majority of the innovation that we are using today private or government the majority of the innovation is coming from US and when you we see that US government is cutting budget for research it’s a mess for us there is a earthquake if I can say with the decision of Mr trump the US president to reduce also the cost of the to reduce the cost of drug by 30 to 80% and this could impact also the research because bioarma will not find funds that will allow the development i’m personally not of Africa i’m not of Tunisia and even if I’m working worldwidely today I’m thinking about the access to innovation so I I love that we reduce the cost of the innovation to give access to more patients but unfortunately with the equation that we have today that only private and only US will fund the innovation it will not be fair so that’s why I think that the world should think about another equation to fund the development of the innovation and again even working for private I’m part from many cooperative group and many patient advocacy today and I think that government also should take their responsibility in funding research all the government I think that worldwidely the WH should play a role more proactive role not just in pandemic area they should play another role giving access to innovation to the whole country and I think a decision like the decision of us also to go out from the WH should give us the possibility to think about what will be the role of this institution in the future should we think about another institution that could play the role to eradicate some deadly disease like cancer and as a researcher I can told you that we can eradicate cancer personally since 2009 we was speaking about precision medicine i have the first theory in precision medicine and I was speaking about this kind of ty drug since 2009 and I I create a a a an advocacy group called cancer.zero the idea is to eradicate cancer but the problem that I am fac facing is access to innovation for country with less resources and especially Africa or other country in in Alia or even here in Europe so and so who drives research and development is it like you say the World Health Organization is it who who’s the one who who leads the charge is it is it the European nations the G7 countries the G20 who who should be in charge of driving uh making sure that there is enough money for the kind of research that you do currently unfortunately the the the funds are coming from a private and especially from the biggest bioarma only and that’s why we can’t blame them on the fact that the innovation is still cost you were speaking about a vaccine that we can easily bring to the market but the cost will be really very high today there is another kind of treatment linked directly to the cure from cancer this is the carti the shimmeric antigen receptor lymphoset and it was the the primary uh the primary drug that give us the idea of thinking about a vaccine against cancer the cost is really high for one for one treatment one dose is 200 around 250,000 and patients to be cure from a disease like acute lymphocitic leukemia when we have the first indication for this drug is six doses so almost€1.2 2 million euro so it’s really very expensive so we can’t blame bioarma because they are financing only the development so we can’t blame them on the cost the high cost i think that worldwidely we should think about a way to fund research we should think that we should bring our our part and the best way to reduce the cost of innovation is to participate to create the innovation so if we will continue to make that at as the only responsibility of bioarma we can’t also ask bioarma to reduce a lot this cost and we can’t ask them to give access to all patients or all patients on the world it’s my dream personally to give access to this kind of drug to this innovative drug to this precision medicine to all the worldwidely to all patients worldwide but I’m certainly I should we should convince politician today and government to participate in this effort of funding all right i want to thank you so much Dr moyes Ben Ali for being with us here on France 24 you are welcome thank you thank you for the invitation

A new treatment nearly halves the risk of disease progression or death from a less common form of breast cancer that hasn’t seen major drug advances in over a decade, Results from the study, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology and could soon establish a new first-line therapy for people with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer. Meanwhile, researchers are combining RNA and AI to develop tailor-made vaccines to combat cancer. For a deeper understanding of new technological breakthroughs in medicine, FRANCE 24’s François Picard welcomes Dr. Moez Benali (MD, PhD), Senior Medical Director at Fortrea. Dr Benali is a member of Fortrea’s global medical team and currently heads Oncologues Sans Frontières.
#RNACancerVaccine #Oncology

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