AMID the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic, there has at least been one piece of undeniably good news: the success of mRNA vaccines.
The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were developed in record time and they have proved extremely effective. They are saving many lives, but this is just the start of something huge.
Advertisement
Using the same approach could help us develop better vaccines for many diseases, including conditions for which we have no inoculation at present. And when the next pandemic comes, we should be able to get more of the world鈥檚 population vaccinated faster than we are managing this time.
Even more exciting is the potential of mRNA medicine to reach way beyond vaccines. mRNA technology is a way of getting our bodies to make any desired protein, the large, complex molecules that carry out most key tasks in our bodies. With vaccines, the mRNA 鈥� which is short for messenger RNA 鈥� provides instructions for making viral proteins to provoke an immune response.
But mRNAs can also code for human proteins for treating all kinds of disorders. As our feature reveals, instead of injecting people with antibodies for treating infections, for instance, it should be possible to inject mRNA recipes for those antibodies. If people have inherited diseases caused by faulty proteins, mRNA can provide working versions. The possibilities are endless.
鈥渕RNA technology is a way of getting our bodies to make any desired protein鈥�
A growing number of drugs already consist of proteins, often antibodies, including the breast cancer drug Kadcyla (trastuzumab emtansine). Antibody drugs can be highly effective, but manufacturing proteins is difficult and time-consuming, which makes these drugs prohibitively expensive.
mRNA therapeutics promises to transform this by getting our bodies to do the hard part of making the protein. In a way, it is just a different method of delivering drugs, but the speed and ease of the process is revolutionary.
And with much more money now being poured into the field after the success of the coronavirus vaccines, that revolution is going to happen a lot faster than anyone thought possible.