...the cubicle stage.
I don't even bother to read their patents any more.
Synthetic mRNA is certainly no slam dunk. Now, when I was a kid, I was wrong about protein drugs, so I never say never.
I'm familiar with their claim about how their vaccine might work, but it seems to rely on intracellular delivery. I'm not sure I'd buy it.
My son, still an undergraduate, is working on microfluidics, and he gave me the copy of "Bad blood" I'm reading. After the first several pages, I said to myself that anyone who heard these claims and actually knew something about clinical bioanalysis and for that matter, microfluids, should have understood readily that the whole Theranos thing was nonsense.
In the RNA world, they have a delicious word for RNA based drugs - to be fair, a few have actually been approved - and that word is "anti-sense." It took two decades from start to finish to get the first anti-sense drug approved. Several companies collapsed trying.
They seem to be saying at Moderna, from a very brief look at their latest science (or sci-fi) press release that their vaccine will rely on messenger RNA to create antigens. Another way to shortcut this process would simply to generate the antigens ex vivo and use them as a vaccine.
It's telling that they seem to have gone from being a therapeutics company to being a vaccine company. That often is a warning sign from God.
The issue with Covid certainly involves glycosylation - fortunately the glycan shield of this virus is nothing as tough as the glycan shield of HIV - and I'm not sure that they will generate the correct antigens. To my knowledge - and admittedly I'm not an expert - RNA to glycan synthesis is ill defined.
We'll see. Hopefully I'm just too stupid to get it, or maybe I'm wary because I happen to be reading "Bad Blood," but I'm thinking that their are other vaccine programs that make better sense and are neither nonsense or anti-sense.
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