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WIRED
13-03-2025
- Health
- WIRED
Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer Vaccines
Mar 13, 2025 4:00 AM The mRNA technology behind coronavirus vaccines is now being used to create bespoke vaccines for cancer patients. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Lennard Lee, a UK National Health Service oncologist and medical director at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, calls himself just a 'simple doctor,' but he's anything but. During the pandemic, he led clinical efforts that showed it was still safe to give cancer patients chemotherapy, disproving fears that the coronavirus made this too risky, helping to maintain cancer treatment worldwide. He also delivered UK research that showed lateral flow testing was effective in identifying the most infectious Covid patients. His most important project, however, is the one he's currently leading as the national government advisor for mRNA cancer vaccines. This new type of vaccine, which is based on the same technology as the Covid vaccines first developed by BioNTech and Moderna, is seen by many as a potential breakthrough in the fight against cancer. Ahead of speaking at WIRED Health in London next week, Lee tells WIRED why he hopes these vaccines will prove to be the 'silver lining of the pandemic.' This interview has been edited for length and clarity. WIRED: There are currently hundreds of mRNA cancer vaccine trials ongoing worldwide. How did the success of mRNA Covid vaccines kickstart this? Lennard Lee: Cancer vaccines weren't a proper field of research before the pandemic. There was nothing. Apart from one exception, pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible. WIRED Health showcases the most exciting and thought-provoking disruptors, scientists, and practitioners making a positive change in how we provide and access health care. Find out more. mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove. Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient. In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that's bespoke to that patient's cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It's like science fiction. In the UK, you set up the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad at the end of 2022 to fast-track cancer vaccine trials. Why set up such an ambitious project right after the Covid pandemic? The pandemic was ending, the Omicron variant was much milder than previous variants, and everyone had had their vaccines. Research in the area of Covid vaccines was starting to close down, but companies like Moderna and BioNTech were trying to figure out what to do next, because there wasn't going to be a need for a Covid vaccine market forever. So they started to pivot to cancer vaccines using mRNA technology, and they were looking for countries with proven capabilities for vaccine research and manufacture. In the meantime, the UK was ready. We had fridges and we had world-class manufacturing and research facilities. During the pandemic, we had proven we could open and deliver clinical trials fast. Also, the UK had established a genomic global lead with Genomics England and the 100,000 Genome Project. All doctors and nurses in this country are trained in genomics. That was a big signpost for any pharmaceutical industry. So the UK government signed two partnerships: one with BioNTech to provide 10,000 patients with access to personalized cancer treatments by 2030, and a 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to produce up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned. During the pandemic, the UK was opening clinical trials in a matter of a few weeks. But before it used to take years to complete a clinical trial. What changed? It was really fascinating, because for many years, we believed that research is inherently slow. It used to take 20 years to get a drug to market. Most cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market. We showed the world that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools. Of course, opening a clinical trial during a pandemic is not necessarily the same as a clinical trial for cancer. But you had a breakthrough moment for the cancer vaccine project at an early stage. There was a trial run by BioNTech, called BNT122, on people with high-risk bowel cancer, which was not recruiting very well across the world. So when we announced the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, the UK cancer community took that opportunity. We opened that trial at Birmingham University Hospital, which was the most surprising thing for me, because it is not a leading cancer vaccine studies center. We needed to get 10,000 patients enrolled in the trial, and we got there within the course of three months. It was quite amazing. It just goes to show that because we're a single health care system, we can do this much quicker than any other country. The dominoes started falling very quickly on the back of that success: we opened a head and neck cancer trial in Liverpool, an esophageal and gastric cancer trial in Dundee, and a lung cancer trial in London. We started to create a community of people who were all pushing for launching cancer vaccine trials as quickly as possible. Several mRNA-based cancer vaccines are in late-stage clinical trials internationally, and the UK is currently running 15 cancer-vaccine trials. When will we see the first approved mRNA cancer vaccine? We have a trial to stop skin cancer coming back after you cut it out. It's now completed. We over-recruited again, just like every single one of the trials that we ran, and the trial finished one year ahead of schedule. That's completely unheard of in cancer trials because they normally run over-long. What will happen now is that, over the next six to 12 months, we will monitor the people in the trial and work out if there's a difference between the people who took the cancer vaccine and the ones who didn't. We're hoping to have results by the end of the year or beginning of 2026. If it's successful, we will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine, within only five years of the first licensed mRNA vaccine for Covid. That's pretty impressive. Hear Lennard Lee speak at WIRED Health on March 18 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets at .
WIRED
07-03-2025
- Health
- WIRED
Want to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier? Then Cultivate Your Social Connections
Mar 7, 2025 5:00 AM Chronic loneliness can increase cortisol and inflammation and weaken your immune system, says social scientist Kasley Killiam. She argues it's time to accept that good quality social connections are a fundamental human need. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Social scientist Kasley Killam has always been fascinated by the science of human connection. In college, for instance, she once decided to conduct a personal experiment and perform an act of kindness everyday for 108 days. At the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, she researched solutions for loneliness. At Google's health spinoff, Verily, her job was to bring people together to promote social health. 'I first came across the term 'social health' during my research at Stanford, where I was developing an app around human connection,' Killam says. 'Since then all my work has been through the lens of connection.' Ahead of her keynote speech at WIRED Health later this month, Killam explains why social health has been the missing factor in human health. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. WIRED: Traditionally, human health has been divided into a physical and a mental component. But you make the case that a third pillar—social health—needs to be introduced. Why is that? WIRED Health showcases the most exciting and thought-provoking disruptors, scientists, and practitioners making a positive change in how we provide and access health care. Find out more. Kasley Killam: The reason why I believe it's so important to elevate and distinguish social health is because connection has such an outsized impact on our health, yet it's overlooked and underappreciated. If you look at all the data, it is incredible the extent to which it impacts and determines our health, our happiness, and our longevity. Connection is not some touchy-feely thing; it influences how long we live. Social health deserves to rise from the shadows and stand tall in the spotlight, because it's much more important than we realize. In your book, The Art and Science of Connection , you point out that the lack of social connections increases the risk of various diseases, from stroke to dementia. One astonishing finding you cite is that we're two to three times more likely to die in the next decade if our relationships are lacking, regardless of our mental and physical health. This is comparable in effect to regularly smoking and excessive drinking, being obese and physically inactive. What's happening to our bodies when we're lonely that leads to such bad outcomes? One of the leading theories is this idea of stress buffering. If you think about hunger or thirst, these are different cues that our bodies give us as a helpful way to know that we're missing something that we need. Loneliness is one of those cues. But when it's chronic, that becomes a problem. Chronic loneliness, just like chronic stress, ultimately increases cortisol, inflammation, and weakens our immune systems. We need other people in order to survive, so chronic loneliness is literally registered as a threat. In contrast, when you have supportive relationships, that calms down your body and you're able to manage stress more easily. Connection is a fundamental need that our bodies understand. You call the current state of our collective social health a public health emergency. Many agree with you: In 2023, the US surgeon general issued an advisory about our epidemic of loneliness and isolation, and the WHO has established a commission on social connection. What do you identify as the root causes for this crisis? The disconnection is a real crisis that gets talked a lot about. But there's also overconnection, where we're actually more connected than ever, but not in meaningful ways. We need to tackle both. There are many factors that have contributed to the status quo, and one we have to call out is technology and social media. That's something that I've become more worried about in recent years. Technology tools need to complement real human connection. But right now, a lot of them are being designed as substitutes or as crutches. AI is one example. Millions of people are using AI as a substitute for a romantic partner or a friend. That worries me a lot. There are also trends in our work culture: how much we work, how busy we feel. We often prioritize our careers over our relationships, at least in North American culture. And there are other trends, like living alone, which is a risk factor, and people being more transient than ever. I've lived in 12 cities and three countries at this point; it's hard to build a community when you're always moving. Of course, we can't talk about this topic without mentioning the impact that the Covid pandemic also had on our social health. What surprised me is that our social health wasn't affected as badly as you might think. Numerous studies showed that, although there was a rise in isolation and loneliness initially, people adapted and were resilient. There was a newfound appreciation for relationships and their importance. A lot of the narrative in the news is that the loneliness epidemic keeps getting worse, but not all the data support that. One of the really interesting findings was about community resilience. There were studies in the US, but also in countries around the world, like Bhutan and Denmark, showing that the places with strong community ties before the pandemic had fewer cases of COVID-19 and fewer deaths from COVID-19. We need to build up social health proactively so we can rely on it in times of need. We're a fan of social health initiatives you describe in your book, like Paris-based Super Neighbors and the idea of 'social prescribing,' which links patients to community groups and services, and is a key component of the NHS's strategy for personalized care in the UK. Are we seeing the start of a social health movement? Absolutely. Social health is today where mental health was 10–15 years ago; I expect the pace of innovation and the size of this industry to accelerate in the years ahead. There's a lot that I'm excited about: Connection curricula in schools to teach youth how to strengthen their social muscles, just like gym class teaches them how to strengthen their physical muscles. Cities investing in redesigning shared spaces. And so much more. I founded the nonprofit Social Health Labs in 2020 and we kicked off with a microgrant program, where every month we gave $1,000 to someone in the US who had an idea for a project to bring people together in their local community. It's been so inspiring. I admire people who do the hard work of fostering empathy and conversation, bringing people together who live within five miles of each other but had never met before. It isn't buzzy. It isn't AI-powered. But it's real, authentic connection—and it's what we need. Hear Kasley Killam speak at WIRED Health on March 18 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets at .
WIRED
05-03-2025
- Health
- WIRED
An Overdiagnosis Epidemic Is Harming Patients' Mental Health
Mar 5, 2025 12:04 PM Diagnosing patients when there aren't effective treatments to give them can make their symptoms worse, argues neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan. Photograph: Caiaimage/Martin Barraud If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan thinks that modern health care is overdiagnosing people but not necessarily making them healthier—and in fact, that it might be doing more harm than good. In her new book, The Age of Diagnosis , she backs this assertion with some sobering facts. For instance, between 1998 and 2018, autism diagnoses jumped by 787 percent in the UK alone; Lyme disease has an estimated 85 percent overdiagnosis rate, including in countries where it's impossible to contract the disease; and there's still little evidence that many cancer screening programs actually reduce cancer-related death rates. Ahead of her keynote speech at WIRED Health later this month, O'Sullivan spoke to WIRED to talk about the boundaries between illness and health, the nocebo effect, and the dangers of early detection. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. WIRED: You've been a neurologist for nearly 35 years. When did you start seeing this new phenomenon of overdiagnosis? Suzanne O'Sullivan: In the book I write about Darcy, a young lady who came to me with seizures. She's only 24 and she had ten other diagnoses. I'm an epilepsy specialist, and that should mean that I'm only seeing people with epilepsy, but unfortunately seizures are a thing that happen very frequently for psychosomatic reasons. When I started, people came to me with seizures that had a psychological cause. That's all they had. WIRED Health showcases the most exciting and thought-provoking disruptors, scientists, and practitioners making a positive change in how we provide and access health care. Find out more. But over the course of the last ten years, that particular group of patients started to gather a long list of diagnoses. What seems to be happening now is that if you go to different doctors with multiple symptoms, you will get a name for them all. These symptoms always existed, but the naming of them has been detrimental to patients. It's caused them to pay a lot of attention to their bodies and that makes the symptoms worse. That's the nocebo effect. Every week now I see at least one Darcy, a 24-year old with different medical labels. Most of those labels have no treatment and aren't making them better. That's a very concerning trend for me. Why are doctors over-labeling symptoms rather than trying to get to the root cause of the disease? We did have an underdiagnosis problem in the past, particularly with learning or behavioral problems such as autism and ADHD. We didn't recognize people who needed help, so we've been trying to correct that. But we've overcorrected. We have been working on the assumption that the more we diagnose, the healthier you can make the population. That was probably true to a point, but the improvement isn't sustained when you get into the milder end of any disease spectrum. Patients come to us wanting answers. People want to understand why they are the way they are. A satisfying consultation between a doctor and a patient is often one where the patient asks about a symptom and the doctor can explain what it is. I think it's a little bit of a collusion between what patients want and how doctors can satisfy them with labels. The increase in the diagnosis rates for ADHD and autism, in particular, have exploded over the past decade. Is this the result of the shifting boundaries between what we now consider to be health and sickness? That's my concern. Autism has risen from like one in 2,500 people to one in 36 children in the UK and one in 20 in Northern Ireland. That happened because people realized that there must be kids out there who've got milder forms of this, and if we help them, they'll get better. However, what has happened now is that we have a massive increase in autism, and it is not having the downstream effect of making children better. We should be seeing a slightly happier population, but all we're seeing is worse mental health. We did something well-intentioned but there's no evidence that it's working. The reason it's not working is because when you get to the very mild end of a spectrum of behavioral or learning problems, you have a balancing act between the benefit of being diagnosed along with the help you can get, and the drawbacks of being diagnosed, which is telling a child that they've got an abnormal brain. What does that do to a child's belief in themselves? How does it stigmatize them? How does it affect their identity formation? We thought it would be helpful to tell children this, but the statistics and the outcome is suggesting it isn't helpful. You're also worried about another aspect of diagnostics, which is overdetection. One example you give in the book relates to modern cancer screening programs that detect the disease at earlier and milder stages. But so far there's little evidence that these are actually beneficial to patients. Every cancer screening program will lead to some people getting treatment when they didn't need to be treated. That will always be the case. What we're desperately wrangling with is that we want to make sure we keep the number of overdiagnosed people down and the number of people who need the treatment up. However, the more sensitive you make those tests, the more overdiagnosed people you will have. I read in a Cochrane review that if you screen 2,000 women, you save one life, and you over treat somewhere between 10 or 20 women. You're always overtreating way more people than lives you're actually saving. So the suggestion that we should do even more of these tests before we've perfected the ones we have does not make sense to me. I do multiple brain scans a week and so many of them show incidental findings. Even though I'm a neurologist and I see brain scans all the time, I don't know what to make of half of them. We just don't yet know how to properly interpret these scans. We need to pay more attention to detecting symptomatic disease early, rather than trying to detect asymptomatic diseases that may never progress. In some cancers—prostate cancer, for instance—patients can opt for watchful waiting rather than treatment. Should this be the norm for early detection? If you're going to go for screening—and I don't want people not to go for the suggested screenings—you do need to understand the uncertainties and realize you don't have to panic. Of course, the minute you hear there's some cancer cells, the panic kicks in, and you want it out and you want the maximum amount of treatment. But actually, in medicine, a lot of decisions can be made slowly. There are watchful waiting programs. I want to suggest to people that, before you go for the screening, know these uncertainties exist, so that you can decide before the test comes back positive what you think you'd likely want to do, and then you can take time to think about it afterwards, and you can ask for a watchful waiting program. I think one of the solutions would be to call these abnormal cells that we find on screening something other than 'cancer.' The moment you hear that word, people's immediate reaction is to get it out, because otherwise they think they will die of it. Watchful waiting is just something people find hard to do. Hear Suzanne O'Sullivan speak at WIRED Health on March 18 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets at .
