357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Many of you are old enough to remember the COVID nineteen pandemic. Uh slightly joking there. It wasn't that long ago, and of course COVID 19 is still with us. It hasn't gone away. But things are very different now than they were in the year 2020. Uh in 2020 there were a lot of lockdowns, a lot of prophylactic measures to try to make sure infection rates stayed low. It was a real global disruption in many ways. And the world is very different. It's mostly back to pre-pandemic behaviors, and that's in large part because we have vaccines. For the virus. And I think that it's kind of underappreciated and truly astonishing how rapidly those vaccines were developed. Of course, by now it's become politicized and there are tribal markers and stuff like that, but put all that aside, let's be reality based right now.

Uh, Covid was bad, the vaccines are wonderful, and they came about very, very quickly. And you may have heard that it's because they're a special kind of vaccine, mRNA vaccines. RNA uh is of course the part of our genetic material that transfers um the messenger RNA in particular, the mRNA. is how you get information from the DNA in our cells, where the genetic information is stored, to the ribosome where you turn that genetic information into proteins. It's the RNA, the mRNA in particular, the shuttling back and forth. And the idea of an MRNA vaccine, I don't know why, I really struggle to say MRNA very quickly, but the idea of it is that rather than injecting the body with a protein like a conventional vaccine and then letting the body react against that protein and build up its immunity, you inject a little bit of genetic material, a little bit of RNA, messenger RNA, which then the cell in your body turn into the proteins, which then generate this immunization response.

And we can control and design and also produce MRNA enormously faster. than we can the proteins that you would need. So that particular technology turned out to be incredibly successful and incredibly um fast and efficient for the particular challenge that we had back in twenty twenty, and just in time. It's a very, very new kind of technology. It's sufficiently new that we are still very much in the process of finding new applications for mRNA technology. Vaccines Broadly speaking, are of course one big application, but there's much better

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (80 minutes, 13,172 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.