Pharmaceutical giant Merck has announced a $200 million licensing agreement with Moderna Therapeutics, a startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that is developing therapies based on RNA. Merck wants to combine its expertise in cancer immunotherapy with Moderna’s personalized cancer vaccines so that the two treatments together can more effectively target cancer.
Moderna hopes to have its tailored cancer vaccines ready for clinical trials in 2017. The company’s novel therapeutics are essentially modified molecules of messenger RNA, or mRNA, which translates the genetic code of DNA into proteins. Rearranging the nucleotides, or letters, in mRNA allows Moderna to create antibodies and other proteins that are useful in therapies for a wide range of conditions.
Theoretically, therapeutic mRNA should allow for the production of virtually any protein in the body. But if it sounds simple, there’s a reason it didn’t gain traction before. If straight mRNA is injected into the bloodstream, the body attacks it in an immune reaction, mistaking it for a virus. Moderna’s treatments overcome this challenge by swapping two of the mRNA letters for natural analogues that don’t trigger a viral immune response.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
