The Russian Ministry of Health announced that it developed a cancer vaccine to be distributed in 2025.
According to Russian news agency Tass, the vaccine uses mRNA technology and will be distributed to cancer patients for free.
It remains unknown what type of cancers the vaccine will target.
Professor Kingston Mills, an immunologist at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, told Newsweek that there must be “skepticism” about the vaccine.
“Until we see data from a clinical trial, there has to be skepticism about this,” Mills said. “There’s nothing in scientific journals that I can see about it. That’s where you usually would start reading, as a scientist, about a breakthrough.”
He noted, “I don’t see any paper about this, so I have nothing to go on in terms of what the science is.” Mills went on to ask, “What is the cancer? What is the antigen? Where is the clinical trial data? These are all unanswered questions, and we haven’t seen any of this data to make a proper assessment of it.”
Similarly, scientists in the United Kingdom are testing a personalized vaccine for melanoma, the Daily Mail reported.
A recent study from the American Cancer Society (ACS) found that global cancer rates are expected to jump 77% by 2050.
As of 2022, there were about 20 million cancer cases. That number is expected to rise to 35 million cases by 2050, largely due to obesity and poor dietary habits. Lung cancer was the most common cancer in 2022 and contributed to 2.5 million new cases (12.4% of global cancers). Breast cancer was the next-greatest cancer (11.6%). Colorectum (9.6%), prostate (7.3%), and stomach (4.9%) cancers were also high.