Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting of the Defence Ministry Board stand during a minute of silence at the National Defence Control Centre in Moscow, Russia, on Monday.
Russia said it has developed a cancer vaccine that will be distributed to Russian patients for free starting in early 2025 -- but the news has drawn skepticism.
Andrey Kaprin, the general director of the Radiology Medical Research Center of the Russian Ministry of Health, announced the development on Dec. 15 on Russian radio, Newsweek reported.
However, it won't be given to the general public to prevent cancer. Newsweek said the vaccine will be used to treat cancer patients, and it will be personalized depending on the person, according to TASS, the Russian state-owned news agency.
Some scientists said they are skeptical because they haven't seen any papers in scientific journals related to the vaccine, which is where a breakthrough in research would be found, Newsweek reported.
"Until we see data from a clinical trial, there has to be skepticism about this," Professor Kingston Mills, a prominent immunologist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, said to Newsweek.
Alexander Gintsburg, director of the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, previously told TASS that the vaccine could suppress tumor growth and stop cancer from spreading, according to pre-clinical trials, The Economic Times reported. Russian President Valdimir Putin hinted about the vaccine earlier this year, the Times said, alluding to its release.
As of now, though, it's unclear which cancers the vaccine is supposed to treat or how effective it's supposed to be, according to Newsweek, but that doesn't mean the cancer vaccine doesn't exist.
"I think what doesn't make sense is a vaccine for cancer -- as we all know there are multiple cancers," Mills said. "So, is this a universal vaccine for all cancers? I'd be very skeptical of that. I think it couldn't be."
He said he needs more specifics, as well as clinical trial data.
"These are all unanswered questions, and we haven't seen any of this data to make a proper assessment of it," Mills said to Newsweek.
But it's an mRNA vaccine, the Times said, meaning it will deliver genetic instructions that enable the body's cells to produce a specific cancer protein -- known as an antigen, which will train the immune system to recognize and create antibodies. Non-mRNA vaccines usually introduce a weakened or inactivated virus into the body to trigger an immune response.
Since the vaccines are personalized to combat a person's unique cancer and target individual tumors, they can take up to two months to produce.
Other cancer-related vaccines have been in the works, and some are already on the market, Newsweek reported, like vaccines against HPV, which help prevent cervical cancer.
In the U.S., neuroscientists at the University of Florida have been testing a potential personalized mRNA vaccine for brain cancer, and pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck & Co are currently working on a skin cancer vaccine, for example, according to Newsweek. BioNTech and CureVac are also said to be making such vaccines, the Times said.