BioNTech said it aims to commercialize the first cancer drug in 2026, thanks to messenger RNA technology, reports AFP.
An anticancer drug will be produced by BioNTech – Photo Archive
The German BioNTech laboratory, which developed one of the vaccines against Covid-19, says it will launch and market the first anti-cancer drug in 2026, according to AFP, quoted by Agerpres.
The vaccine is based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, also used by Covid-19 vaccines.
“The company intends to continue to develop its projects with a view to its first oncology launch planned for 2026.”BioNTech stated in a statement on the occasion of the publication of its annual results.
Moreover, the laboratory is currently working on several therapies against different types of cancer (melanoma, prostate, head and neck, ovaries, lungs, colorectal), immunotherapies and vaccines, which are currently in the clinical trial phase.
According to the release, BioNTech hopes to obtain approvals for ten of these treatments by 2030, the release states.
Millions of doses of the anti-Covid-19 vaccine, developed together with the American company Pfizer, were sold, and the profit was used by the BioNTech laboratory for cancer research, the initial specialty of this laboratory founded in 2008 by two oncology researchers .
Innovative messenger RNA technology
Messenger RNA technology offers new perspectives for the development of innovative therapies against cancer, which are the subject of intense competition between several players in the pharmaceutical world.
For its part, the company Moderna hopes that its therapeutic vaccine against skin cancer, currently in the testing phase, will be approved from 2025.
These therapies do not fight cancer cells directly, but instead stimulate the patients' immune system so that it can fight the cancer.
One of the challenges is to face “heterogeneity and variability” cancers, which differ from one patient to another, by combining “different mechanisms of action”explained BioNTech.
“(…) There are many types of cancer in different stages and the disease differs from one patient to another'BioNTech co-founder Ugur Sahin explained to Bild newspaper in November.
Decoding all possible mutations is a long-term task, making the development of treatments for these diseases more complex than the development of a vaccine against COVID-19.
“Our goal is to develop a cancer vaccine tailored to each patient,” Sahin had previously stated to the German newspaper.
After the jump in revenue due to sales of the anti-Covid-19 vaccine, the company based in Mainz (western Germany) saw its sales return to normal, at 3.8 billion euros last year, against 17.3 billion in 2022. The profit annually fell to 930 million euros, ten times less than the previous year.
