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COVID-19 helping leap forward in medical research

CALGARY (CityNews) — A medical renaissance.

Massive amounts of resources have been funnelled towards developing COVID-19 vaccines, leading to potential medical breakthroughs in other areas like HIV and cancer treatment — the silver lining of global tragedy.

It could be compared to what happens after a war.

Despite massive suffering and loss of life, the push to innovate to win leads to a huge jump in technology.

“Penicillin and all those anti-biotics and the search for more and then it slowed and we haven’t had a new drug in that area for quite a while so this may be impetuous to say we need to protect ourselves better in the future,” said Derek McKay, the director at Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases.

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In this case, it’s not the COVID-19 vaccine itself researchers are interested in, it’s the first-of-its-kind mRNA technology used to create the vaccine which holds so much potential.

“You can see it being applied to anti-microbial resistant bacteria, which are really troublesome and will be in the future if we don’t tackle it,” said McKay.

It’s the versatility that has researchers and doctors alike excited about its future potential.

“They can be for cancer vaccines,” said John Lewis, a professor in Department of Oncology at the University of Alberta. “They can be used to cure childhood genetic diseases, they can be used to cure a whole host of other things that ail humans and now we know they work and we understand, with this crash course, how to
manufacture them on a massive scale.”

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It’s something researchers have been studying for years, with massive amounts of resources put into developing a COVID-19 vaccine catapulting that work forward.

“We’ve learned that we can take a devastating worldwide disease and come up with a cure for it in a rapid, almost unprecedented, time and there’s really no reason we can’t do this for every other disease that plagues us,” said Lewis.