mRNA therapies under fire

Recently, mRNA therapies have come under fire from lawmakers and most notably, the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. But, what is mRNA, how does it work? What are the benefits of it?

Short for messenger RNA, mRNA exists naturally in every cell of every living organism. Its discovery in 1961 was also celebrated with a Nobel Prize. mRNA was used to develop the vaccines that fought against COVID-19 and saved an estimated 20 million lives.

Clinical trials show mRNA-based vaccines are increasing survival in patients with pancreatic and other deadly cancers. Biotechnology companies are investing in the promise of mRNA therapies to treat and even cure a host of genetic and chronic diseases, including Type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Dr. David Engelthaler, Executive Director at Health Observatory at ASU Health, joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss mRNA and recent criticisms of the technology.

Dr. Engelthaler expressed great hope in the potential in the technology to achieve goals previous types of vaccines could not.

“We can use that to actually make vaccines against foreign invaders or against bad things in our body like cancer,” Dr. Engelthaler said.

“With the idea that we want precision medicine, precision health, that’s what mRNA vaccines do. We can be very precise about people’s cancer. We can actually sequence the cancer and make the vaccine very targeted for that person and their cancer.”

However, recent criticism of mRNA vaccines from health leaders such as Secretary Kennedy have left Dr. Engelthaler questioning what they aren’t understanding about mRNA.

“It is kinda hard to understand why people at higher levels aren’t fully understanding this, because this has been really well described now for the past several years, especially during the pandemic,” Dr. Engelthaler said. “It’s a natural biological process; it’s not invading your DNA; it’s not changing your genome or anything like that.” He added, “It’s essentially just shortcutting some of the steps of what your overall immune response is to a foreign invader so that you’re ready to deal with it when you do actually see it or when you get that cancer.”

Despite the skepticism around mRNA vaccines from some like Secretary Kennedy, Dr. Engelthaler remains hopeful this technology could result in massive leaps in the progress of treating cancer and other diseases.

“It really does seem that using this technology, we can really program it to respond to almost any invader and almost any cancer,” Dr. Engelthaler said. “There are dozens of trials for cancer; there are many other trials for other pathogens as well.”