I was thinking about this very subject this morning, and I realised the mRNA stuff actually isn’t the exciting part.
It’s the packaging in lipid particles that is much more interesting. We can get away with this approach for vaccines because we (largely) don’t care where we deliver the payload to, just as long as we get mRNA to a cell where it can make the protein. Not sure about current formulation, but I read most LNPs end up in the liver from circulation.
The next level of tech is targeting the particles, and then it gets as tricky as other contemporary techs, because you want your targeting mechanism on the prticles to be something resembling a receptor ligand (protein/carbohydrate).
Manufacturing of those (and putting them on a lipid particle) is still a slog. If we figure out nice ways to do that (without reasonable purity) then it doesn’t matter what is in the LNP (e.g put gold particles inside cancer targeting particles and zap your cancer cells dead).
An alternative approach would be to learn enough to make mRNA “programs” that once inside a cell could determine cancerous vs healthy cells. There’s been research on computations using DNA, and many natural pathways do similar “calculations”, that it seems feasible to create a “if specific xyz protein/carbohydrate/etc in cell exceeds threshold trigger cell death pathways”. Then injection in a tumor mass should be sufficient. The mRNA program might only need to be partially accurate to be more effective than many chemotherapy’s.
From what I’ve read both are options. There’s benefits to getting the immune system to target cancerous cells
Such as ongoing protection. Directly killing the cells is a good way to reduce tumor mass by direct injection however. The first t-cell immune treatments almost killed the patients due to liver/kidney overload from cellular debris as the immune system reacted too strongly, so being able to in cull tumor mass in a controlled fashion likely has merit as well. Either way the “detection method” would need to be very well tested and robust I imagine. Though the first treatments could be for “last chance” treatments that’d enable testing the safety of the particular detection method.
It’s the packaging in lipid particles that is much more interesting. We can get away with this approach for vaccines because we (largely) don’t care where we deliver the payload to, just as long as we get mRNA to a cell where it can make the protein. Not sure about current formulation, but I read most LNPs end up in the liver from circulation.
The next level of tech is targeting the particles, and then it gets as tricky as other contemporary techs, because you want your targeting mechanism on the prticles to be something resembling a receptor ligand (protein/carbohydrate).
Manufacturing of those (and putting them on a lipid particle) is still a slog. If we figure out nice ways to do that (without reasonable purity) then it doesn’t matter what is in the LNP (e.g put gold particles inside cancer targeting particles and zap your cancer cells dead).