The article say that they spent a decade of research on mRNA vaccines before. That was obviously well before anybody knew about SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19. Does this mean that the research basically was about creating sort of like a "template" vaccine that can then be specialised or programmed with the specifics of the thing you're trying to vaccinate against?
The goal is to take someone with cancer, and then create a vaccine for the exact cancer mutation that person has. this would be a custom one-off vaccine that wouldn't work for anyone else because their cancer is different in some way. I don't know if this will work, but it would be a great improvement to cancer treatment if it does.
> Does this mean that the research basically was about creating sort of like a "template" vaccine that can then be specialised or programmed with the specifics of the thing you're trying to vaccinate against?
That may (or may not) have been the effect (at least within a narrow family of similar viruses), and is definitely something they market about their “mRNA platform”, but their immediately-previous mRNA vaccine work which was ongoing when they shifted to SARS-CoV-2, was specifically directed at MERS-CoV, another very similar betacoronavirus of significant public health impact (though a lot less widespread than SARS-CoV-2 has become.)
None of those came to market. Many did make it through trials. This is more about pushing this as a first onto the market so pharma companies can finally prove they're safe, and then making a shit ton of money on more vaccines after.
