Before the coronavirus, most people had never heard of mRNA vaccines. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID mRNA vaccines were the first to be used in humans. But the technology had been in development for years ― and among the diseases it was being tested on was cancer. In mid-June, BioNTech announced that the first patient had been treated in its BNT111 Phase 2 cancer vaccine trial. The vaccine uses the same mRNA technology as the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine. “Similar to the way an mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 works, an mRNA cancer vaccine trains your immune system to recognize a certain protein on …
