Advantages of mRNA

RNApharm

Advantages of mRNA

Advantages of mRNA based vaccines and therapeutics

Reduced development time

New infectious disease vaccines in the future can also be developed quickly.
Efficiency in the development of various treatments

More efficient application to the development of a variety of treatments
induction of innate immunity

The mRNA itself is good at inducing innate immunity

In living organisms, genetic information contained in DNA is made into mRNA through transcription and post transcription processes, and information contained in mRNA is translated into proteins, and these proteins perform various functions in vivo.
Pathogen infections and cancer cells are largely eliminated by the host's immune response and do not develop into disease. At this time, pathogens and cancer cell-specific proteins play an important role in the host recognizing them as foreign substances and inducing an immune response. Therefore, the development of COVID-19 vaccines and protein vaccines against various infectious diseases is being extensively studied. However, currently vaccine proteins are expressed in animal cells, which has the disadvantage of requiring a lot of development cost and time. Vaccine proteins undergo post-translational modification, such as glycosylation, however, the post-translational modification mechanisms in animal cells differs from those in host cells. Since mRNA vaccines are directly expressed in the actual inoculated host cells, these problems can be overcome and development time can be shortened. In fact, Pfizer/BioNTech's COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was developed within 8 months from development to clinical approval. In addition, since new vaccines can be developed by simply changing the mRNA sequence of the existing platform during vaccine development, rapid development of new infectious disease vaccines in the future is possible. With these advantages, many companies are currently developing vaccines for various infectious diseases as well as vaccines for cancer treatment, many of which are in the process of clinical trials.
Recently, protein has been receiving a lot of attention as a treatment. Protein therapeutics are mostly blockbuster treatments, and many large pharmaceutical companies are investing heavily in them. However, proteins have low cell permeability, so they are mostly targeted at extracellular targets. However, proteins produced by mRNA can be released into the cytoplasm, specific organelles, and the outside of the cell, making it more efficient to develop various protein treatments. In addition, mRNA itself induces innate immunity well, and mRNAs for innate immune proteins with high cancer treatment ability that can be directly administered to cancer cells are being developed for cancer treatment, and many clinical studies are being conducted. Moreover, mRNA is used to manufacture CAR-T cells for cancer treatment, which is currently in the spotlight.