MRNA

Nikos Pekiaridis | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesModerna on Thursday posted a surprise quarterly profit, in part boosted by deferred revenue, even as the company saw slumping sales from its Covid vaccine, its only marketable product. The results cap a rocky year for the biotech company and other Covid vaccine makers, which all saw revenue plunge as the world continued to emerge from pandemic and relied less on protective shots and treatments.Here's what Moderna reported for the fourth quarter compared with what Wall Street was…

Human babies are far better at learning than even the very best large language models. To be able to write in passable English, ChatGPT had to be trained on massive data sets that contain millions upon millions of words. Children, on the other hand, have access to only a tiny fraction of that data, yet by age three they’re communicating in quite sophisticated ways. A team of researchers at New York University wondered if AI could learn like a baby. What could an AI model do when given a far smaller data set—the sights…

What makes it a different beast? Conventional mRNA vaccines consist of messenger RNA that carries the genetic code for covid’s spike protein. Once that mRNA enters the body, it gets translated into proteins by the same cellular machinery that translates our own messenger RNA.  Self-amplifying mRNA vaccines contain a gene that encodes the spike protein as well as viral genes that code for replicase, the enzyme that serves as a photocopier. So one self-amplifying mRNA molecule can produce many more. The idea of a vaccine…

A new study presents a novel method for understanding bacterial gene regulation, potentially accelerating efforts to combat antibiotic resistance. By examining how DNA replication affects gene transcription, researchers have developed a way to identify regulatory states of genes, offering insights into microbial growth and resistance mechanisms. Credit: SciTechDaily.comResearchers discovered a method to expedite the study of bacterial gene regulation, which could help fight antibiotic resistance by analyzing DNA…

To keep IL-12 inside tumors, scientists at Strand designed a set of instructions called a genetic circuit that tells the mRNA to make the inflammatory protein only when it detects the tumor microenvironment. The circuit is designed to sense levels of microRNA—molecules that naturally regulate gene expression and give off different signatures in cancer cells versus healthy ones. The genetic circuit instructs the mRNA to self-destruct if it goes anywhere other than its intended target.“We’ve engineered the mRNA so that they…

You might think a biotech company that created a new vaccine, using novel tech like mRNA-based therapeutics, in record time to help the world fight a historic pandemic like COVID-19 would still be flying high. That hasn’t been the case so far for Moderna, whose only FDA-approved product to date remains its COVID vaccine Spikevax and its various forms for teens and children. But a new analyst report from Oppenheimer released this week asserts the company’s pipeline of mRNA-based vaccine candidates, for infectious diseases…

On Wednesday Florida’s state surgeon general Joseph Ladapo called for stopping the use of messenger RNA–based COVID vaccines, citing—without convincing evidence—concerns about DNA fragments from the vaccines entering the human genome. Experts, including those at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, say the claims are unfounded and that this warning could cause great harm by preventing people from getting a potentially lifesaving vaccine.Last December Ladapo sent a letter to the commissioner of the FDA and the director…

Moderna has announced the results of a Phase 2b trial investigating its mRNA treatment for skin cancer, and it continues a streak of promising news. When paired with an immunotherapy, the treatment significantly reduced the risks of recurrence, metastasis and death compared to existing treatments alone, paving the way for trials against other cancers.While mRNA research has been in progress for decades, it was greatly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Buoyed by the success of the vaccines, the companies behind them –…

While using mRNA as medicine is new, mRNA has been inside you for your entire life. The cells in your body create mRNAs that serve as instructions to make specific proteins you need to function. Researchers can create new mRNAs to correct those instructions when they aren’t working. I am a molecular biologist who studies how cells control their mRNAs to make the proteins they need, a basic question of how life works at the cellular level. While most scientists studying mRNAs are not creating new drugs, this…

Researchers have discovered that a chemical modification to the synthetic messenger RNA used in therapeutics can cause the cell’s machinery to misread its instructions and result in unintended immune responses. Importantly, they’ve also discovered a solution to the problem.Messenger RNA, mRNA, tells cells in the body how to make a specific protein. It’s also an effective way of combatting disease, exemplified by its use in vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 and personalized cancer vaccines. mRNA therapeutics came about when…