With all sincerity I'd like to say, thank you Covid. We knew in the early '90s that mRNA tech held a potentially life changing future for us. But we wondered how to get the money to fund it. From sorrow we emerge into light.
A personalized mRNA vaccine against pancreatic cancer created a strong anti-tumor immune response in half the participants in a small study.
www.nih.gov
I remember when the first attempts to decode the the human genome from 1993 - 2000, which got a pretty good map. Enter the 21st century, a slew of societal crap and a ton of technological developments in genetics like CRISPR that came out of the original Genome Project. When Covid hit, one of the first things I told my wife and kid was, "We have a fuck-ton of new technology since the last 'global' pandemic. This is the first time some of that tech is being given hard-core, real world, battle testing. They'll knock this out and come away with a lot of new tools to fight old battles."
The next 20 years in medicine are just going to keep accelerating in development, Cancer and HIV are both in the cross hairs of mRNA treatment research right now. For the first time I actually have a degree of hope they'll actually conquer those two in totality within my lifetime. We just need to do our best to keep funding going to the researchers despite the fundamentalist cult of ignorance that's afraid of big words and concepts that require more thought than tying their shoes.
