The Global Story: Will the new cancer vaccine survive RFK Jr’s America?

**Asma Khalid** (0:00)
Hey there, it's Asma Khalid, one of the hosts of the Global Story Podcast from the BBC. And as a bonus for your feed, we're bringing you one of our favorite episodes of the week. Now, every weekday on The Global Story, we try to tell one big story in depth about where the world and America intersect. In this episode, we look at a scientific breakthrough that comes with a lot of baggage here in the US., a vaccine for skin cancer that has shown promising results in a recent clinical trial.
What's notable is that this is an mRNA vaccine, and you all might recognize that term mRNA because it's the same technology that was used in some COVID vaccines. And that is what is making this new scientific breakthrough so politically tricky. The COVID vaccines led to the rise of vaccine skepticism within the highest ranks of the US government, complicating the future of this potentially life-saving new research in America and around the world. So I hope you all take a listen to this episode, and if you enjoy it, you can always find more from us by searching for The Global Story wherever you get your podcasts. Now, on to today's show.
It was 1997 at the University of Pennsylvania in Philly. A Hungarian-American scientist by the name of Dr. Katalin Kerikó was wandering the halls looking for a copy machine. And when she found one, she came across another researcher. They struck up a conversation.

**Katalin Karikó** (1:23)
And so I was bragging that I worked with RNA, and then he was telling me that he wanted to develop a vaccine. And that's how, you know, we started.

**Asma Khalid** (1:33)
Dr. Kerikó and her research partner would go on to spend years working together on what was sometimes a scientific dead end, an mRNA vaccine. For years, their efforts amounted to little. But in 2023, after the development of the COVID vaccines that used mRNA technology, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:53)
Together, they have saved millions of lives, prevented severe COVID-19, reduced the overall disease burden and enabled societies to open up again.

**Asma Khalid** (2:05)
Last week, there was another watershed moment from that same mRNA technology, a potential cancer vaccine. And yet the news comes in a tough climate for vaccines.
Last year, the US. Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK Jr, cut half a billion dollars of funding into mRNA research. From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, DC. And today on The Global Story, the new skin cancer vaccine and the promise and politics of mRNA technology.

**Tom Whipple** (2:44)
I'm Tom Whipple. I'm a science writer and I present Inside Science on BBC Radio 4 and The World Service.

**Asma Khalid** (2:52)
Well, Tom Whipple, welcome to The Global Story. It's a pleasure to have you with us. Thanks for taking the time.

**Tom Whipple** (2:57)
It's a pleasure.

**Asma Khalid** (2:58)
Today on the show, we want to dive into the health and policy debates around mRNA technology, particularly here in the United States where I sit in this political moment. But the reason that we wanted to have this conversation today is because of a major medical breakthrough that made headlines just the other day, what is being described as a personalized cancer vaccine. Now, to be abundantly clear to listeners, it is not like you or I, Tom, could take a jab and have immunity from developing skin cancer.
This is a different type of vaccine. Nonetheless, I'm hearing it described as a game changer. Can you explain what was actually announced and why it is being seen as so significant?

**Tom Whipple** (3:40)
Yeah.
As you say, this isn't you would get your summer booster shot and then not be able to catch skin cancer for that summer. It's absolutely not that. There is a reason which we'll get into why the word vaccine is still perfectly appropriate. But what this is, is that if you've got a skin cancer, or in theory, we'd like this to work for lots of cancers, you remove it. But the real worry is it comes back. We all know about metastases and the idea that cancer spreads in the body, even after you've removed it. What this is doing is it is training your body to attack it. It's training it to attack the cancer cells that are there in the tumour, so that your body's own defences take it out.
In that sense, it's very much like a vaccine, in that the idea of a vaccine is you show your body a little bit of the thing that you want to attack, and then your immune system is trained, and away it goes and attacks it. This is a really big deal. The caveats are, we don't yet know how well this worked. We know that this has gone through stage 3 trials, which is the final stage of trials before you can introduce a drug or a treatment.