The mRNA technology is trying to reverse this challenge. What they are doing, instead of introducing, let’s say, a piece of the virus… you are sending a message to yourself through a messenger RNA so that your cells will produce a similar protein like the protein of the virus.
Once you do that, then your body will recognize this protein that something is not normal that it should be here so it will develop antibodies against this protein, and then you will be protected when the real virus comes.
So as you can see now, you don’t even put a piece of the virus. You don’t put any foreign protein in you. You are putting a very small piece, a message, of RNA that will stay a few days in your body and then [disappear]. But those will send the signal to yourself to produce this protein. It is a very revolutionary idea that really was discovered twenty years ago, and it was studied for all these two decades with the last five years way more intensively, and BioNTech was one of the pioneers in doing these studies. Moderna was another one, and eventually, the first success that we’re able to do was this product that we developed jointly with BioNTech, the COVID-19 vaccine.
FREDERICK KEMPE: What other doors might this mRNA vaccine open for you and for science in general?
ALBERT BOURLA: I think cancer was the first thing that we try to tackle with the mRNA technology, and I know that BioNTech worked very intensively to do that. The idea is that you are training your body to attack the proteins of your tumors. You identify the tumor and then you send a message through the messenger RNA to yourself, start attacking this tumor. It is a very big field that is studied very intensively right now.
Another field is the field of infectious diseases. We saw the first vaccine ever, which was the COVID-19 vaccine, with mRNA technology. Ourselves, we are working on a flu vaccine, as I said, since 2018, and that could be next-generation flu vaccines with mRNA. But also we are working on multiple other targets, creating vaccines for other infectious diseases.
There is a third application, which is for people that they are born with a mistake in their DNA code, and there are a lot of rare diseases; they are happening to people because somewhere in one gene there is one small mistake in their DNA, and those people, they have to live without until the end of their lives and many times their life doesn’t last very long because of this mistake in their genes.
