Cancer treatment is on the verge of a historic revolution driven by the hyperpersonalization of medicine. Until now we were working with the idea of manufacturing general medicines to treat cancer, but the idea of manufacturing a unique and exclusive medicine for the genetics of each patient’s tumor has been around for years in laboratories, but the great bottleneck has always been the manufacturing time and, logically, the immense costs.
A new step. China just gave the green light to the world’s first production line for cancer vaccines powered entirely by artificial intelligence. Located in Beijing, this facility is owned by Likang Life Sciences, a firm that has invested approximately $16.1 million in setting up a factory designed to operate at unprecedented speed.
Its most advanced product is the LK101 neoantigen vaccine and it delegates the complex task of sequencing tumor DNApromising to synthesize customized doses in just one day. The definitive objective of this technological deployment is for patients to receive their personalized injection a few days after undergoing the biopsy.
Why an AI? The key here is in the “neoantigens”, small mutated proteins that are exclusively in tumor cells and in each patient we find specific antigens. Here AI intervenes as an ultra-fast analytical engine by scrutinizing the tumor’s genetic information and predicting which parts of the antigen will be most effective in awakening and directing immune system cells to kill the tumor.
Because here the only thing we seek is to activate the natural defenses we have, as we already do with immunotherapy, so that it is able to find tumor cells and destroy them, just as it does, for example, when we have an infection. But this is a process that requires great personalization and, above all, great speed to act as soon as possible on patients. And this is something an AI can do.
for a long time Science has been paving this path, as we saw with an article published in 2024 which demonstrated that the integration of AI in the design of mRNA and DNA oncological vaccines is essential to know with maximum accuracy the composition of a tumor and its weak points. And to avoid failures, the algorithms are trained with large databases that we already have, where all the possible variants that a tumor may have are found.
Another good news is that pioneering publications in Nature had already demonstrated the feasibility of RNA vaccines to induce specific and memory immune responses in patients with melanoma or even in such lethal and complex tumors. like pancreatic cancer.
The nuance. It must be made very clear, first of all, that the promising results obtained in animals do not directly guarantee success in all patients, with clinical efficacy in humans still being very limited. And currently the vast majority of studies focused on this new personalized treatment are in very early stages.
On the other hand, although China has built the first large algorithmic factory, its clinical research ecosystem remains very closed, and the data indicates that between 2014 and 2024 89 clinical trials of oncological vaccines were registered in this country. Something that greatly clashes with the 757 tests that have been carried out in the United States in this same period.
And more limited. Added to this is that Chinese trials have an almost exclusively domestic vocation, with barely 2.2% global reach compared to 47.6% in the United States. But they also address less oncological diversity, focusing on about 5 types of cancer compared to the more than 20 studied by North American competitors.
Images | Testalize
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