Will mRNA Technology Companies Spawn Innovation Ecosystems why

The mRNA technologies that helped rapidly create effective Covid-19 vaccines could become technology platform businesses, which has tremendous implications for players in the world of drug development These platforms could attract other companies interested in exploiting their advantages to develop other drugs. But all the stakeholders — platform owners,  external pharmaceutical and biotech companies, policymakers, and regulators — will have to make a variety of choices Messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which continues to play a key role in the ongoing fight against Covid-19, represents one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of our time. The widespread effectiveness of mRNA-based vaccines has attracted considerable attention to the prospect of mRNA technology serving as a platform that can be used to develop an array of preventative and therapeutic medicines, including vaccines for infectious diseases and cancer treatments Such a technology architecture is remarkably similar not only to the architecture of other health and life science technology platforms, such as CAR-T cell therapies or technologies, but also to some in the digital sector. There, many platforms have given rise to innovation ecosystems: a group of companies that share core technologies and develop new products and services around that common base. We believe that mRNA technology platforms could spawn similar ecosystems, which would have implications for innovation in the pharmaceutical industry Platforms have rightly garnered tremendous attention in recent years thanks to the work, for example, MIT’s Koch Institute and Flagship Pioneering’s approach to venture creation in the life sciences One Flagship offspring, Moderna, and BioNTech have used their mRNA technology platforms to develop an important product — a safe and highly effective Covid-19 vaccine — at unprecedented speed. Moderna also claims to have a team of several hundred scientists dedicated to advancing the firm’s platform. This involves developing delivery systems for mRNA-based medicines that may be more biodegradable, less toxic, and thus more tolerable at high doses than existing therapies For example, mRNA therapies for cancer may be able to deliver highly effective treatments without the extreme side effects that patients experience with many traditional chemo therapies. Stéphane cancel, Moderna’s CEO, has explained: “We think there are 10 or 20 different cell types to which we can deliver mRNA. … Once you have the delivery, then you can do lots of different drugs, because RNA is information.” In that sense, mRNA is the “software” that can be rewritten. Historically, drug development has been one-off — focused on identifying a molecule that modulates a disease target and seeking protection and regulatory approval of that molecule and its uses based on evidence from clinical studies. While these efforts involve long, complex, and increasingly costly processes, an approach to addressing one disease target often does not work for another target. As a result, R&D projects have had to be highly customized. Using a platform, however, would make it possible to achieve economies of scope, thereby significantly increasing the productivity of the drug development process — for instance, by allowing manufacturers to leapfrog multiple steps of developing a new mRNA-based therapy. Moreover, drugs and vaccines based on the same platform may gain faster regulatory approval because the platform has already been validated its safety already established with regulators and clinicians.