Company Developing RNA for General Drug Use

[BillTre]

Moderna Therapeutics has apparently been working on developing RNA for drug uses with a minimum of publicity, publishing mostly just patents and getting a lot of investment capital.
Their goal is to make injectable RNAs that will be translated into specific proteins.
This approach could be useful for many purposes.
Seems they have made several technological developments to make this more feasible (news to me).

Here is a rather long and interesting Science magazine News article about it.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

I was unaware that Melissa Moore had left her position at UMass to work for Moderna. That's too bad–I enjoyed reading the papers from her lab.

I had heard of Moderna previously (maybe b/c I used to work in the Boston area), and there's definitely a lot of promise to what they're doing (as evidence by the amount of venture capital they have amassed). However, may other efforts to develop RNA therapeutics have faced significant challenges. For example, no one has really be able to develop RNAi into a useful therapy, and the one RNA-based therapeutic that I know of, eteplirsen from Sarepta, has looked like it lacks efficacy in the clinic (one reason to be skeptical that CRISPR will have immediate clinical applications). However, Moderna's technologies seem to be able to address some of the problems plaguing RNA therapeutics, so perhaps they will be able to succeed where so many others have failed.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Moderna published the first trials of their mRNA vaccines:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...a-release-jump-starts-biotech-s-bid-rna-drugs
http://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-therapy/fulltext/S1525-0016(17)30156-9