While the melanoma clinical trial at Hollings is no longer enrolling patients, a clinical trial using the same approach in non-small-cell lung cancer is still open.
Moderna, which helped develop one of the two primary COVID-19 vaccines, has expanded mRNA use not only to cancer but also to flu, respiratory syncytial virus and norovirus, among others just being tested in South Carolina, the company said. Those sites are in Charleston, Columbia, Greenville, Mount Pleasant, Myrtle Beach, North Charleston and Spartanburg, among others.
Those clinical trials likely will continue, said James Chappell, president and CEO of SCBio, which promotes the life sciences industry in the Palmetto State. It is the long-term implications that are troubling.
“It’s certainly disappointing,” Chappell said. Those mRNA vaccines are “really cost effective.”
“They’re much quicker to develop, which is why they were used,” he said. “You can change them quicker for new variants and strains,” which makes them adaptable to new threats.
The federal move take away funding could hamper mRNA work overall, Jenkins said.
“From a cancer perspective, I do worry that this might take away some of the momentum that has been building,” he said.
If U.S. officials aren’t funding mRNA development, other countries might be happy to step in, Chappell said.
“If it’s not us, someone else is going to pick that ball up and run with it, and that’s a real fear that that we’re going to lose that innovative edge in the biotech space if we’re abandoning these great technologies,” he said.
China, for instance, is “aggressively” pursuing some of these advances and seeking to become the innovation leader, Chappell said.
It just makes sense that could be the outcome, Talaat said, that the U.S. would lose its leadership not just in mRNA but in vaccine development overall.
