How mRNA Technology Could Upend the Drug Industry

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mRNA Technology Gave Us the First COVID-19 Vaccines. It Could Also Upend the Drug Industry

across the U.S. and Europe, RNA has been deployed to make a whole new type of vaccine that will, when it reaches enough people, change the course of the pandemic.. In January 2020, before many in the Western world were paying attention to a new virus spreading in China, Dr. Ugur Sahin was convinced it would spur a pandemic. Sahin, who in 2008 co-founded the German biotech company BioNTech with his wife Dr.

Another traditional approach is to inject a subunit of the virus, such as one of the proteins that are on the virus’s coat. The immune system will then remember these, allowing the body to mount a quick and robust response when it encounters the actual virus. The vaccine against the hepatitis B virus, for example, works this way.

Her 21-year-old triplets, all of whom were studying biochemistry, volunteered to be early testers, getting the vaccine and seeing if they developed the desired antibodies. Trials in monkeys conducted at a Montana primate center in March also produced promising results. There is another way to get genetic material into a human cell and cause it to produce the components of a dangerous virus, such as the spike proteins, that can stimulate the immune system. Instead of engineering the gene for the component into an adenovirus, you can simply inject the genetic code for the component into humans as DNA or RNA.and a handful of other companies in 2020 created a little circle of DNA that coded for parts of the coronavirus spike protein.

Scientists including Sydney Brenner at Cambridge and James Watson at Harvard first identified and isolated mRNA molecules in 1961. But it was hard to harness them to do our bidding, because the body’s immune system often destroyed the mRNA that researchers engineered and attempted to introduce into the body.

By then, a similar mRNA vaccine was being developed by Moderna, a much smaller company with only 800 employees. Its chair and co-founder, Noubar Afeyan, a Beirut-born Armenian who immigrated to the U.S., had become fascinated by mRNA in 2010, when he heard a pitch from a group of Harvard and MIT researchers.

An mRNA vaccine has certain advantages over a DNA vaccine, which has to use a re-engineered virus or other delivery mechanism to make it through the membrane that protects the nucleus of a cell. The RNA does not need to get into the nucleus. It simply needs to be delivered into the more-accessible outer region of cells, the cytoplasm, which is where proteins are constructed.

 

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