357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics

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**Sean Carroll** (0:53)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Many of you are old enough to remember the COVID-19 pandemic.
Slightly joking there, it wasn't that long ago. And of course, COVID-19 is still with us. It hasn't gone away.
But things are very different now than they were in the year 2020 In 2020, there were a lot of lockdowns, a lot of prophylactic measures to try to make sure infection rates stayed low. It was a real global disruption in many ways. And the world is very different. It's mostly back to pre-pandemic behaviors. And that's in large part because we have vaccines for the virus. And I think that it's kind of underappreciated and truly astonishing how rapidly those vaccines were developed. Of course, by now, it's become politicized and there are tribal markers and stuff like that. But put all that aside, let's be reality based right now.
COVID was bad, the vaccines are wonderful, and they came about very, very quickly. And you may have heard that it's because there are a special kind of vaccine, mRNA vaccines. RNA is of course the part of our genetic material that transfers the messenger RNA in particular. The mRNA is how you get information from the DNA in our cells, where the genetic information is stored, to the ribosome, where you turn that genetic information into proteins. It's the RNA, the mRNA in particular, the shuttling back and forth. And the idea of an mRNA vaccine, I don't know why I really struggle to say mRNA very quickly. But the idea of it is that rather than injecting the body with a protein, like a conventional vaccine, and then letting the body react against that protein and build up its immunity, you inject a little bit of genetic material, a little bit of RNA, messenger RNA, which then the cells in your body turn into the proteins, which then generate this immunization response. And we can control and design and also produce mRNA enormously faster than we can the proteins that you would need. So that particular technology turned out to be incredibly successful and incredibly fast and efficient for the particular challenge that we had back in 2020 And just in time, it's a very, very new kind of technology. It's sufficiently new that we are still very much in the process of finding new applications for mRNA technology. Vaccines, broadly speaking, are, of course, one big application. But there's much larger potential applications. I mean, think about it. You're injecting into your body a little bit of genetic code, which then your cells will use to make some kind of protein, right? That's an enormously big arena to play in if you're trying to come up with therapies for various kinds of diseases. And even more, even more recently and even more exciting, we can join this mRNA technology to gene editing technologies, like the CRISPR technologies we've talked about on the podcast before, to do not just vaccines but genetic repair. We can fix mistakes in your DNA while it is still in your body. At least that is the vista that is going to be laid out in the podcast today. We're talking with Jeff Coller who is here at Johns Hopkins.
He has a wonderful title. He is Professor of RNA Biology and Therapeutics. So very much the person to talk to about exactly the topic of today's podcast. He will explain, we're going to start very simply with what is an RNA, how does genetics work, things like this. How do mRNA techniques change how we do therapies of various sorts? How do we get them into the bodies? Where do they go? What are the challenges? Because there's lots of challenges. It's very, very new technology.