MRNA’s Next Chapter Has Nothing to Do With COVID-19 Vaccines
August 02, 2021 at 04:30PM It’s safe to say that before the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, most people hadn’t thought about messenger RNA, or mRNA, since high school science class—if ever. The molecule plays a pivotal role in the body, carrying the recipes for making various proteins to the parts of cells that produce them. But “mRNA” wasn’t exactly a common phrase until Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna harnessed the genetic material’s power to teach the body to make a piece of a protein found on the COVID-19 virus’ surface, thus training it to fight the real thing, were it to attack. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The tremendous efficacy of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines has generated plenty of excitement about its potential use in vaccines for other diseases . And vaccines may be just the beginning. Last month, researchers used mRNA to deliver CRISPR gene-editing technology that could permanently treat a rare genetic disease in humans—an ad...