mRNA cancer vaccines currently in development offer significant economic benefits
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In August 2025, the United States cut funding for vaccine development by half a billion dollars. This puts at risk the potential benefits of mRNA cancer vaccines — benefits that could be worth about $75 billion a year in the United States alone, according to an estimate by Alison Galvani of Yale University and colleagues.
“The therapeutic advances demonstrated by each of the clinical trials in our analysis have the potential to prevent nearly 50,000 deaths, with an economic value of $75 billion,” the team writes. “These estimates represent only a single annual cohort of patients treated for their respective cancer. »
Reducing federal investment in mRNA vaccine technology risks losing these benefits, researchers warn.
Many of the most effective cancer treatments developed recently rely on boosting the body’s immune response to tumors. mRNA vaccines can be used to stimulate the immune system to target proteins on cancer cells – and because they can be created so quickly, they can even be personalized based on the cancer affecting each individual.
To estimate potential benefits, Galvani and his team looked at 32 mRNA cancer vaccine trials currently underway in the United States. They identified the 11 most promising trials, then estimated how many additional years of life would be gained over a three-year period if these vaccines lived up to their promises and were administered to everyone in the United States who could benefit from them in a given year.
Finally, the team calculated the value of these extra years of life using a statistical measure of the value of a year of life based on how much people would be willing to pay for it. For this measure, the team took the value used by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to calculate the impact of regulatory changes.
The figure by annual group may be overestimated because some of these vaccine candidates may not be approved, says Oliver Watson of Imperial College London, who used a similar approach to estimate that Covid-19 vaccines provided health and economic benefits worth between $5 trillion and $38 trillion globally.
But if the team calculated the value for more than one annual cohort receiving cancer treatments and looked at the benefits over a longer period, the figure would be much higher. “These savings are definitely underestimated,” Watson says.
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