The idea that we could use a vaccine to defeat cancer is not, says Ugur Sahin, chief executive of BioNTech, a new one. “We have had this thought for almost 100 years.”
The concept is simple, he says. “We stimulate the immune system, do something magic, and the tumour disappears.”
For most of those 100 years there has, though, been one small problem.
“We had to solve the ‘something magic’.”
Now, the man whose company gave us the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — applying himself to the comparatively simple problem of stopping a pandemic — believes it is, at last, time to use the same technology to fill in that magical gap. He is not alone. Today Sajid Javid, the health secretary, launched a ten-year plan for…
Read more at The Times.