New Delhi: The world was devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Another pandemic can’t be ruled out in the coming years. However, cancer remains the most dreaded and feared disease across the globe.
A vaccine for cancer has remained elusive. But if President Vladimir Putin is to be believed, Russian scientists are close to developing vaccine for cancer which could soon be available to patients, Reuters reported.
“We have come very close to the creation of so-called cancer vaccines and immunomodulatory drugs for a new generation,” the Russian President said at a Moscow forum on future technologies on Wednesday.
“I hope that soon they will be effectively used as methods of individual therapy,” Putin stated in televised comments.
Putin, however, did not go into details like which types of cancer the proposed vaccine would target, or how. Several countries and companies have been working on cancer vaccines for years.
The UK government last year signed an agreement with Germany-based BioNTech to start clinical trials to provide “personalised cancer treatments”, and aims to reach 10,000 patients by 2030.
Major pharmaceutical companies like Moderna and Merck & Co have been working to develop an experimental cancer vaccine to reduce chance of recurrence or death from melanoma — deadly skin cancer — by half after three years of treatment.
According to World Health Organisation, there are already six licenced vaccines against human papillomaviruses (HPV), which causes many cancers including cervical cancer, and also vaccines against Hepatitis B (HBV), which can lead to liver cancer.