Synthetic mRNA is indeed the highway for today’s therapeutics, whether you’re working on developing new drugs against cancer targets, or whether you aim to develop new vaccines, Covid-19 being one of them. So, how can you obtain your mRNA within just a few weeks, ready to explore these potential applications? Read on to see how we can help you achieve this.

Advances in mRNA Vaccines for Infectious Diseases

It is now admitted that mRNA vaccines provide a safe and long-lasting immune response in humans. Since capping of the mRNA is involved in the protein production into the cells, the capping technologies are of great interest for the development of prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines. In this post, I’ll focus on the CleanCap reagents (Trilink BioTechnologies), and notably the CleanCap AU for the self-amplifying mRNA, as well as their benefits, especially for vaccine approaches against pathogens (including the SARS-CoV-2).

Capping is a required protection in 5′ of the mRNA that is necessary for biological activity and stability into the cells. There are already several methods of capping using mCap, ARCA or enzymatic methods. Unfortunately, they are limited in efficiency (such as mCap and ARCA), and can be costly (such as the enzymatic methods). Trilink Biotechnologies, the modified nucleic acid experts, have developped a new, far more efficient technology called CleanCap available in Europe via tebu-bio.

Vector-free CRISPR-CAS9 gene editing to accelerate therapeutic applications

A few years ago, Ayal Hendel et al (doi:10.1038/nbt.3290) published results revealing that chemical alterations to sgRNA enhance gene editing in primary cells. To demonstrate this, Matthew H Porteus’s team chose the targeted genes CCR5, HBB and IL2RG respectively involved in anti-HIV clinical trials, cell anaemia and thalassemia, and severe combined immunodeficiency. More recently, the same team tested several modified CAS9 mRNA. You can find the practical results on this poster introduced at the ASGC.