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Complete the form below and we will email you a PDF version of "Capsule for Oral mRNA Delivery Developed and Tested"
Renowned scientists and engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed and tested a capsule-based system for oral delivery of mRNA therapeutics.
Brief history of nucleic acid therapeutics
The Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, BNT162b2, was the first mRNA-based vaccine to receive authorization for human use in 2020. Now, an estimated 560.73 million doses have been administered globally.* The vaccine – and it’s mRNA-based predecessors, like Moderna’s mRNA-1273 – have played a fundamental role in our pandemic response.
In The Limitless Future of RNA Therapeutics, Damase et al propose that we are “living in the midst of a therapeutic revolution, the likes of which have not been seen since the advent of recombinant protein technology almost 50 years ago in Silicon Valley”. This revolution, the success of the mRNA-based vaccines utilized in the pandemic response and those that will likely follow, relied on several decades’ of previous research in nucleic acid therapeutics.
What are nucleic acid therapeutics?
“Nucleic acid therapeutics” can be used to describe all nucleic-acid-based approaches that are able to modulate gene expression, either by inhibiting, adding, replacing or editing at the DNA/ RNA level.
A major barrier to the clinical translation of nucleic acid therapeutics has been the fact that nucleic acids themselves are rapidly degraded by the body – particularly RNA. It makes their delivery challenging, but, as the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines demonstrate, not impossible. More work is needed to design and test novel delivery systems for the promise of nucleic acid therapeutics to be realized.
Next-generation drug delivery systems
The research laboratories of Dr. Giovanni Traverso and Professor Robert Langer focus on the development of next-generation drug delivery systems.Traverso is an assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering at MIT, and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School. Langer is the David H. Koch institute professor at MIT and the most cited engineer in history.