BioNTech SE

MRNA Platforms

Our mRNA Platforms – revolutionizing vaccine technology

Our mRNA platforms are designed to activate or modulate the immune system from different angles, each providing a distinct strategy to address cancer or prevent infectious disease.

FixVac – off-the-shelf, indication-specific mRNA cancer vaccine platform

While every patient’s tumor has a unique composition, they can share certain sets of markers, so-called antigens. These markers are consistent within specific cancer types and are often expressed in many patients with the same type of cancer but not found in healthy cells in the body. As cancer cells have developed mechanisms to avoid detection by the immune system, a big challenge in treating cancer successfully is that the immune system does not recognize the cancer cells as malignant cells and thus does not trigger an immune response to attack and defeat this enemy. By presenting the right set of antigens for each cancer indication to the immune system, we can activate immune cells that recognize cancer-specific antigens and turn them against the cancer cells. This idea is the basis for our FixVac mRNA cancer vaccine platform. 

The architecture of our FixVac platform

Our FixVac (Fixed Vaccine) platform candidates consist of a fixed combination of mRNA-encoded non-mutated tumor antigens, which are known to frequently express within specific cancer types. The mRNA is formulated with our proprietary RNA-lipoplex delivery formulation which is designed to enhance mRNA stability in the body as well as to target antigen-presenting dendritic cells (DCs) – the boot camps of our immune system. By enhancing the presentation of these specific tumor antigens by DCs to the immune system, our FixVac candidates aim to trigger a strong and precise innate and adaptive immune response against cancer cells expressing one or more of the respective tumor antigens. This approach offers the potential to also treat cancers with low mutational burden effectively, which represents half of all patients with metastatic melanoma.