Humanity’s Challenges and Breakthroughs in Science and Technology That May Help – Part 1

The human challenges we face today globally are dominated by the immediate COVID-19 pandemic, the short and long-term impacts of anthropogenic climate change, growing food insecurity, our reliance on digital everything and where that is taking us, evergrowing energy demands, inequality and economic disparity among nations, and a lack of singular purpose for our species in addressing all of the aforementioned.

In Part 1 we look at COVID-19 and how the virus has both devastated the nations of the world and at the same time accelerated development of a technological and scientific breakthrough known as mRNA. Messenger RNA, mRNA for short, represents what some biomedical experts call the cheapest fix ever invented to address so many chronic and often fatal diseases that inflict our species as well as others.

In an article appearing in the spring in the Penn Medicine News, a publication of The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Alex Gardner writes about how mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are launching a paradigm shift in the treatment of influenza, and herpes with research at UPenn on each as well as work being done on future COVID variants and other coronaviruses.

Using mRNA technology to produce a seasonal version of the COVID-19 vaccine is in the works. Borrowing from what we have learned about the influenza virus and its seasonal mutations, scientists believe they should be able to predict mutational trends and conceive where the virus is going to create a vaccine each year, and even regional versions of the vaccine where a mutation is localized.

The transformational nature of RNA molecules and the ability to use them as a vaccine delivery mechanism has been researched for 27 years at UPenn. The current Pfizer-BionTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines owe their origins to research that started in 2005. The vaccines when injected instruct the body to make the definitive viral signature of COVID-19, a single spike protein that then triggers the body’s immune system to create specific antibodies that recognize the real virus immediately when present. But the beauty of the mRNA vaccine delivery mechanism is that the instructions can be changed to produce unique protein structures associated with other invaders whether viruses or microorganisms and as a result get the body to generate the antibodies to address each of them. And a single mRNA vaccine can be used to create several protein structures to help the body combat many invaders in one fell swoop.

mRNA vaccines are easy to construct. States Dr. Drew Weissman, a Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Perelman School of Medicine, UPenn, “mRNA vaccines are essentially plug-and-play. We believe you can change the part of the mRNA that encodes a protein, plugging in new code specific to the virus we hope to protect against, and cause one’s body to produce proteins that match that virus’ proteins. We do not have to develop and manufacture an entirely new formula.”

At UPenn, research to develop an mRNA vaccine to tackle herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2), a non-curable disease, is well underway. The vaccine identifies three HSV-2 proteins to create an antibody to stop the virus from entering cells, and two other antibodies to stop the virus from interfering with the immune system of the host. Human clinical trials are planned for 2022. The success of the HSV-2 mRNA vaccine will spur efforts to address other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) using the technology.

Then there is influenza which evolves rapidly each year requiring scientists to scramble to identify which of the many viral flu strains is likely to have the greatest impact on human populations. Again, the beauty of mRNA technology is you can tick all the right boxes by delivering several different protein structures in a single vaccine. At UPenn, they have already started human influenza mRNA vaccine trials.

Elsewhere in scientific laboratories around the world, mRNA technology is being used to invent vaccines for Hepatitis A, B and C, Rubella, Measles, Rotavirus, HIB, HIV, HPV, Tetanus, Diphtheria, Chickenpox, Polio, Diphtheria, Pneumococcal pneumonia, Meningococcal Meningitis, Ebola, Pertussis, Malaria, Rabies, Zika, Chikungunya, and a range of cancers.

In its listing of breakthrough technologies for 2021, the MIT Technology Review states, “We got very lucky” that COVID-19 happened at a point in time where mRNA technology was arriving on the scene to transform medicine. The promise of this technology cannot be underestimated in the 21st century.