On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin said that Russian scientists were almost done making cancer medicines that would soon be offered to people who needed them.
“We have come very close to the creation of so-called cancer vaccines and immunomodulatory drugs of a new generation,” Putin said on TV.
Adding, “I hope that soon they will be used effectively as methods of individual therapy,” he said at a Moscow conference on new technologies.
Putin did not say what kinds of cancer the vaccines would attempt to prevent or how they would do it.
A lot of governments and businesses are working on medicines against cancer. The UK government and BioNTech, a company based in Germany, made a deal last year to start clinical studies of “personalized cancer treatments.” The goal is to reach 10,000 patients by 2030.
Moderna and Merck & Co. are working on an experimental cancer vaccine. A study that was only halfway through showed that it cut in half the chance of getting melanoma, which is the deadliest type of skin cancer, or dying from it after three years of treatment.
The World Health Organization says that there are six licensed vaccines against human papillomaviruses (HPV), which cause many types of cancer, including cervical cancer. There are also six licensed vaccines against hepatitis B (HBV), which can cause liver cancer.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Russia made its own Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19 and sold it to several other countries. However, many Russians refused to get vaccinated, which hurt sales in Russia.
Putin personally confirmed the effectiveness and safety of Sputnik.
