Science Diction Podcast | mRNA Vaccines

Transcript—mRNA Vaccines: A Best Kept Scientific Secret for the Past Two Decades

Dr. Amy Manning-Boğ

Dr. Luca Popescu is a veterinarian turned global infectious disease expert. His experience includes working with viral and bacterial pathogens like anthrax, SARS, MERS, Plague, and SARS-CoV-2, which we all know too well, causes COVID-19. Luca is focused on testing medical countermeasures like vaccines and therapeutics in response to these and other diseases.

Today on the show MRNA vaccines, their history, why they’ve been so critically important to the COVID response and what’s next for their use in supporting global health. I’m Amy Manning-Boğ and this is Science Diction from MRIGlobal.

Dr. Luca Popescu

So mRNA is Messenger Ribonucleic Acid… If you think of the DNA as like the whole building blueprint, mRNA is kind of the instructions for making like a door or something for the, for the building. So in practical terms, in the cells, the mRNA goes to the ribosomes and then gets transcribed into amino acids that then make up proteins. So it’s kind of the blueprint for all the proteins that your different cells use.

Dr. Amy Manning-Boğ

So when the COVID pandemic hit, how is this not so new in RNA technology put to use?

Dr. Luca Popescu

Because it’s such a good messenger in terms of coding nucleic acid encoding genetic material to produce proteins. It’s been used recently within the past couple of decades to code for and make your cells express specific proteins. In the case of COVID-19, it’s the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 and that’s caused the pandemic. So it basically makes your body produce the antigen or the target for your immune system to combat the virus.

Dr. Amy Manning-Boğ

So you said decades.

Dr. Luca Popescu

So mRNA is actually fairly old technology as far as, you know, cutting edge science is concerned. The first in vivo experiment in mice was done with mRNA in 1990.

I think it’s kind of a best kept secret for the past two decades or so. People have been working on it. They’ve done a lot of initial trials and initial efficacy work with a number of different disease states, from cancer to infectious disease.

Dr. Amy Manning-Boğ

So you did have you the scientific community you, had a body of work on safety with mRNA Therapeutics.

Dr. Luca Popescu

Before the 2020 pandemic, there were a number of human clinical trials and animal trials with mRNA technology for different diseases. I think it was mostly cancer therapeutics where they basically tested this platform to ensure its safety and at least some initial efficacy in human patients. So we had that that body of knowledge to build on.

So once the pandemic hit, they kind of already had those platforms in place. And the pandemic really pushed the envelope for that necessity to come up with a novel vaccine platform that could be rolled out quickly and effectively and safely. Because there was such a dire need, the Department of Health and Human Services stood up Operation Warp Speed to work on these vaccines and therapeutics as quickly as possible. 

We at MRIGlobal, we’re involved with that in terms of developing animal models. So we needed to come up with good models to work with the the virus in vivo to basically determine how it acts in animal models so that we can test the efficacy and the safety of these vaccines. 

This is probably one of the safer vaccines we’ve ever developed. Right. It’s been administered to millions of people and all the body of research that we have indicates that it saved tens of millions of lives. And I think we’re only going to improve on these technologies.

Dr. Amy Manning-Boğ

So could you explain a bit more…

Dr. Luca Popescu

I think definitely the the existing vaccine applications need to be improved a little bit because the breadth of immunity and the duration of immunity are both not as long as I think anybody would want them to be right so you saw this with the breakthrough of Omicron on existing basically immunity so you had the original Wuhan strain and the original vaccine that protected against that strain. And then Delta was a little bit less protected and then Omicron was basically you need a new vaccine. So if we’re going to keep doing this, every couple of years, obviously we’re just going to keep having to produce more and more vaccines. And I think I would really like to see the the vaccine delivery and its interaction with the immune system be improved so that the immune response is longer lasting. So you don’t need to keep getting it year after year if the virus doesn’t change. And if the virus does change, which it probably will, having the ability to trigger a more broad immune response so that it can neutralize, you know, even novel coronaviruses in this case.

Dr. Amy Manning-Boğ

Following decades of research and innovation, in addition to the COVID vaccines mRNA vaccines are now arriving to the clinical trial stage for various solid tumors and other cancers and infectious diseases like Influenza A and rabies. 

Dr. Luca Popescu

I think it definitely has the potential to be applied both in the developed world like in the United States and Europe, but also in the developing world. So large parts of Africa and Southeast Asia and Latin America, South America still have very low vaccination rates. So disseminating the vaccine and the vaccine technology to those countries, I think is going to be very important to combat both SARS-CoV-2 and other diseases, especially infectious diseases and vector borne diseases like West Nile and yellow fever, and definitely malaria, which is definitely probably the the major one that’s killed billions of people, people over the course of human history and continues to do so, obviously, in in much of the global south and one that we haven’t really developed a vaccine for because there’s so many different Plasmodium strains and so many strains of the parasite that causes malaria and they mutate all the time and they’re very hard to study. So having a vaccine platform like MRNA that’s very quick and nimble and able to be adapted is definitely something that, you know, would benefit the malaria response. 

Dr. Amy Manning-Boğ

That’s really interesting. This is such a fascinating technology to use to address infectious diseases around the world. Are we just beginning to uncover the possibilities here with this technology?

Dr. Luca Popescu

The fascinating and exciting thing about MRNA is that it’s really a platform technology. So it’s something that can be used and has been used obviously for SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19. But a lot of these exciting new venture capitalist companies have invested a lot of money into a variety of other diseases, from cancer to genetic diseases.

Dr. Amy Manning-Boğ

You’re talking about human health. I know you’re a veterinarian by training. What about animal health? Is there application in that arena as well?

Dr. Luca Popescu

The platform, like I said, is very adaptable. So it all relies basically on the sequence of the RNA and the specific thing that you’re trying to target. It can be used for any basically any virus or any infectious disease agent to target their, you know, weak spots, specifically in terms of their proteins or anything like that. I think the major limitation with anything moving from humans to animals is the cost, especially in agriculture. You know, you want that cost to be as low as possible because otherwise consumers won’t, you know, pay more for for bacon, if you will. So I think we might still be a little bit ways away in terms of seeing that kind of used en masse in in agriculture animals. But certainly, I think, you know, once the the cancer therapies get better established, we could see that in oncology and pet health and, you know, giving it to dogs and cats and more companion animals. It’s really, you know, sky’s the limit as far as future applications.