Russia Says It Has Developed New Cancer Vaccine, Will Distribute It For Free

The Russian Health Ministry has announced that it has developed a cancer vaccine that will be distributed to patients free of charge in early 2025. The vaccine will reportedly be used to treat cancer patients rather than given to the public to prevent cancer.

Andrey Kaprin, the General Director of the Radiology Medical Research Centre of the Russian Ministry of Health, announced that the country has developed its own mRNA vaccine against cancer and it would be distributed to people free of charge, reported Russia’s TASS news agency.

The vaccine is expected to be launched in general circulation in early 2025. The Director of the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology Alexander Gintsburg told TASS that the vaccine’s pre-clinical trials had shown that it suppresses tumour development and potential metastases.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russian scientists were close to creating vaccines for cancer that could soon be available to patients. “We have come very close to the creation of so-called cancer vaccines and immunomodulatory drugs of a new generation,” he said in televised remarks in February.

It is not yet clear which cancers the vaccine is supposed to treat or what it is called. Other countries are working on similar projects. For example, the British government has signed a contract with a German-based BioNTech company to develop personalised cancer treatments, according to Newsweek.

Use Of AI In Cancer Vaccines?

Earlier, Gintsburg said that the use of artificial neural networks could bring down the duration of computing required to create a personalised cancer vaccine to less than an hour.

Now it takes quite long to build [personalised vaccines] because computing of how a vaccine, or customised mRNA, should look like uses matrix methods, in mathematical terms. We have involved the Ivannikov Institute which will rely on AI in doing this math, namely neural network computing where these procedures should take about half an hour to an hour,” the vaccine chief told TASS.

Pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck & Co are developing an experimental cancer vaccine that a mid-stage study showed to cut the chance of recurrence or death from melanoma – the most deadly skin cancer – by half after three years of treatment.

There are some licensed vaccines against human papillomaviruses (HPV) that cause many cancers, including cervical cancer, according to the World Health Organisation, as well as vaccines against hepatitis B (HBV), which can lead to liver cancer.