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Episode #78 - mRNA technologies [1]

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Date: 2022-09 

mRNA technologies. What is their future and scope, and what are the challenges that countries might face

in rolling them out? Hello and welcome to Science in5. I'm Vismita Gupta-Smith. We are talking to Dr.

Soumya Swaminathan today. Soumya, talk to us about mRNA technologies. What is the future?

Dr Soumya Swaminathan.

I think everybody around the world now has heard of mRNA. It stands for messenger RNA, and basically

it's part of our cellular architecture. The RNA molecule is a sort of translator. You can think of it as a

waiter who takes the order from the DNA - that is the customer, and takes it to the kitchen, that then

prepares the food or the proteins in the cell. So this technology has actually been worked on for the last 30

years, but it's only during this pandemic that we realize a full potential of it.



And billions of people around the world now have received an mRNA vaccine. So apart from COVID

vaccines, the technology can be used to make vaccines for many other diseases, and many of them are

already quite advanced. We've got vaccines for influenza, for other viruses, like the respiratory syncytial

virus, for Lassa fever, for example, but also to try and develop better vaccines for malaria, for TB, for

HIV, and then beyond infectious diseases this technology is now being used by some companies and centers to target cancers, because we know that for many cancers now, once you identify the genetic change in the cancer, you can actually try and target the treatment for that. So again, very exciting opportunities for treatment of human and probably

animal diseases as well.

Vismita Gupta-Smith

Soumya, talk to us about the challenges that countries might face when rolling out these technologies.

Dr Soumya Swaminathan

The first one, of course, is the access to the vaccine. And we've seen that there have been global

inequities. And even today, over 75% of Africans have not been fully vaccinated. So this is a challenge,

and we're trying to meet that through expanding manufacturing around the world, through our mRNA

technology transfer program, so that hopefully in the next couple of years, we will have much more

diversified capacity, both for R&D and for manufacturing. The second challenge is really getting health

systems up to speed and able to vaccinate, populations at a scale that hasn't been done before.

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[1] Url: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/media-resources/science-in-5/mRNA-technologies

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