Defending against the next bioweapon: the mRNA imperative

Modern synthetic biology and AI represent both medicine’s greatest breakthrough and warfare’s most terrifying evolution. In this new landscape, where biological weapons can be designed faster than traditional defenses can be developed, recent government decisions risk abandoning our only countermeasure that can keep up: messenger ribonucleic acid, better known by its acronym, mRNA.

Known most famously for the prominent role it played in vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), mRNA is a medical platform that can generate new defenses in days rather than years. In layperson’s terms, mRNA amounts to a temporary set of instructions that tells cells how to make a specific protein.

It should be said upfront that as co-founder of Tevard Biosciences, a company developing tRNA-based (helper molecule that carries the right building blocks to the cell’s protein-making machinery) therapeutics for genetic diseases, I have a commercial stake in the broader RNA medicines field. I also co-founded the Alliance for mRNA Medicines, a nonprofit organization advancing mRNA technology. My perspective, however, is based on three decades of research in RNA biology — including work in my laboratory that contributed to the design of Spikevax, Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine — and direct experience with the public-private coordination that made Operation Warp Speed possible.

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