Personalized Cancer Vaccines Will Be A Revolution In Medicine, Said Bill Gates

Since 2001, MIT Technology Review has annually released a list consists of 10 "breakthrough technologies" that it believes will immensely influence our lives. The 18th edition of this list was selected by Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates. One of the selected technologies has the ability to eliminate the world's second cause of death.

According to Bill Gates:

Companies including Genentech and BioNTech are currently focusing on this research.

Gates stated that the idea of developing cancer vaccines started in 2008 when a cancerous tumor cell's sequenced genome was first published by geneticists. Based on that, researchers have found that most tumors carry their own unique mutations and the same mutations do not appear in healthy cells and other tumors.

Therefore, research companies have created and tested vaccines containing mutated copies of cell mutations from a particular. The vaccine could urge the immune system into finding and destroying any cells that contain the mutations in their exact tumor.

Gates also pointed out that:

Each year, almost 600,000 people die because of cancer. Because of the deathly characteristic of cancer, customized cancer vaccines would become a breakthrough.

However, in MIT Tech, Gates also raised his concern over how it would be challenging for us to produce enough vaccines for cancer patient quickly and cheaply.

He wrote: