4 ms·

Completely agree. Imagine if an mRNA vaccine hits? Every government in the world will be clambering to start their own vaccine defence arm for national security

Completely agree. Imagine if an mRNA vaccine hits? Every government in the world will be clambering to start their own vaccine defence arm for national security. The technology is so attainable for so cheap, it's going to flip the infections disease paradigm. No longer will we be lamenting so much about the end of antibiotics, we will be lamenting about computational screens for neutralizing targets of surface antigens coming up short. Do you want to put your tech abilities toward this problem? Learn about genomics, structural biochemistry, and genetic alignments. So you have a positive clinical hit for an antigen against some organism? What other organism has a homologous gene? Do you need to try and fold the new one to see if the antigen you hit is still solvent exposed? Join-up with David Baker, or any computational structure prediction group. D.E. Shaw will be a big funder of this stuff. Gates foundation. The golden age of biotech is coming, learn the tools today. Just look at the biotech IPO market this year alone.

ignoramous 6y ago
Thanks. Any books, blogs, Twitter accounts you'd recommend?
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply, it made me think about the book idea. The topic is still too new for a book, but it's a good idea; maybe more of a treatise needs to be written on the subject right now. Regardless, the parents of modern mRNA vaccinology are Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, follow his publications. Here are a couple good reviews to get you started (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 and https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812 https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812). I say modern, because the idea of using modified chemistry is likely going to be key to a successful mRNA vaccine. Without it, the immunogenicty leads to safety concerns and a reduction in transcript expression--it's just too hot. CureVac founder and arguably the first person to really drive the idea of an mRNA vaccine into the clinic is Ingmar Hoerr, but his company started before the idea of modified chemistry. He is a fantastic scientist, but ultimately CureVac came too soon and has triple-downed on canonical uridine. Another issue is they likely can't get FTO so they don't really have a choice. As for blogs/twitter accounts, none of the mRNA people are active on social media likely because the stakes are just too high right now. If you're interested in mRNA beyond vaccines, check out Sek Kathiresan on twitter. He's active. He's the CEO of Verve. Worst kept secret of the gene editing (e.g., CRISPR) world is that everyone is pivoting to using mRNA for expression of the editing enzymes (e.g., CAS9, ADAR, APOBECs).

ignoramous 6y ago

Thanks. Any books, blogs, Twitter accounts you'd recommend?

DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
Thanks for the reply, it made me think about the book idea. The topic is still too new for a book, but it's a good idea; maybe more of a treatise needs to be written on the subject right now. Regardless, the parents of modern mRNA vaccinology are Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, follow his publications. Here are a couple good reviews to get you started (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 and https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812 https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812). I say modern, because the idea of using modified chemistry is likely going to be key to a successful mRNA vaccine. Without it, the immunogenicty leads to safety concerns and a reduction in transcript expression--it's just too hot. CureVac founder and arguably the first person to really drive the idea of an mRNA vaccine into the clinic is Ingmar Hoerr, but his company started before the idea of modified chemistry. He is a fantastic scientist, but ultimately CureVac came too soon and has triple-downed on canonical uridine. Another issue is they likely can't get FTO so they don't really have a choice. As for blogs/twitter accounts, none of the mRNA people are active on social media likely because the stakes are just too high right now. If you're interested in mRNA beyond vaccines, check out Sek Kathiresan on twitter. He's active. He's the CEO of Verve. Worst kept secret of the gene editing (e.g., CRISPR) world is that everyone is pivoting to using mRNA for expression of the editing enzymes (e.g., CAS9, ADAR, APOBECs).