the kept promises of messenger RNA

� Four letters that look like a secret code. They changed the world during Covid-19 and have just silenced, with supporting figures, the conspiratorial rumors that accompanied their arrival. mRNA (for “messenger”), this technology which made it possible to create vaccines against Covid-19 in record time, has kept its essential promise: to protect without danger.

A large survey carried out among 29 million people, coordinated by two French public organizations*, has just demonstrated this: “MRNA vaccines do not increase the risk of mortality from all causes in the long term.” This is just the beginning.

Because if the pandemic gave a boost to this technology discovered in 1961, its potential extends well beyond vaccination against Covid. Its healing promises seem endless: cancers, genetic diseases, like Charcot, chronic conditions…

Thanks to its ability to re-educate the immune system, autoimmune pathologies, such as Crohn’s disease or multiple sclerosis, could be treated. The advantages would be multiple: a personalized, targeted, very effective treatment, with few side effects.

Hope against cancer

It is in oncology that the results are most awaited. Thousands of clinical trials are underway. A study, presented at the European Cancer Congress last October and published in the scientific journal Nature**, shows that in patients suffering from a type of lung or skin cancer, receiving an mRNA vaccine against Covid within one hundred days following the start of their immunotherapy almost doubles survival, after three years.

Above all, mRNA paves the way for “therapeutic vaccines” against cancer. Unlike the classics – against infectious diseases (flu, etc.) – it is not a question of preventing the disease before it arrives, but of triggering an immune response against a tumor.

Using fatty particles, mRNA sends genetic instructions to help the immune system fight proteins specific to cancer cells. Research is progressing on lung, breast, prostate, pancreatic, brain and skin cancers… An American company is aiming for a vaccine by 2028 against melanoma.

*Epi-Phare study, December 4, 2025.

**bit.ly/ARNnpelerin