There are a lot of companies (including mine) that have been working on personalised, target, combinatorial, interfering, etc. RNA therapeutics for quite some time. The success of RNA vaccines in the last year has really opened up the potential for pharma partnerships to test and develop these kinds of things. They have built out the infrastructure and there's a broad confidence and awareness of the basic concepts that was previously largely missing. Pharma just really loves proteins.
The next 5 years are going to be incredibly exciting - it has the potential to fundamentally change humanity's relationship with many kinds of disease.
Actually vaccines can be used for lots of therapies. One example is using personalized vaccines for creating immune reaction for cancer by sequencing the cancer DNA and comparing it with non-cancerous DNA.
Yes, from the article you can see they have been working on this flu vaccine since 2019 - before covid. They haven't had as much money, so it takes longer.
Anyways, I really hope them to succeed, my mother didn't take the flu vaccine ,,because it's risky and not that useful anyways''.
Moderna can make it much more efficient with less side effects, so I'm looking forward to it.