> These drugs face the challenges of targeting mRNA to specific tissues and giving strong, lasting benefits without excessive side effects.
This innovation reminds me of Virginia Postrel's book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World [1]. Postrel describes several key technological innovations that propelled the manufacture of cloth from fiber farming to thread weaving to cloth weaving to cloth dying/decorating to distribution. Each innovation moved the bottleneck to a different layer in the value chain.
The mRNA platforms are ideal for vaccines but ultimately, the downstream safety/efficacy trials are the new bottleneck. There was a time when futurists obsessed about nanobots but these mRNA platforms are the ultimate nanobots, in my opinion. They can be configured to program biological cells to manufacture simple proteins in situ. This is a very powerful tool, but like the historical innovations in spinning and weaving, the technology can produced many orders of magnitude more potentially useful outputs than the rest of the value chain can use effectively (for now).
> These drugs face the challenges of targeting mRNA to specific tissues and giving strong, lasting benefits without excessive side effects.
This innovation reminds me of Virginia Postrel's book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World [1]. Postrel describes several key technological innovations that propelled the manufacture of cloth from fiber farming to thread weaving to cloth weaving to cloth dying/decorating to distribution. Each innovation moved the bottleneck to a different layer in the value chain.
The mRNA platforms are ideal for vaccines but ultimately, the downstream safety/efficacy trials are the new bottleneck. There was a time when futurists obsessed about nanobots but these mRNA platforms are the ultimate nanobots, in my opinion. They can be configured to program biological cells to manufacture simple proteins in situ. This is a very powerful tool, but like the historical innovations in spinning and weaving, the technology can produced many orders of magnitude more potentially useful outputs than the rest of the value chain can use effectively (for now).
[1] https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/virginia-postrel/the-fabri...