I came up with the same idea for treating autoimmune disease years ago - in my first year of med school, actually. Back then the platform for doing this elegantly via mRNA didn't really exist, though, and I didn't want to drop out of med school to spend a half-decade or more in grad school proving the concept the clumsy way.

I'm really glad that it's finally come to fruition, but I definitely feel a bit of regret that I have come to embody the "ideas are cheap, execution matters" truism.

I really hope this mRNA train keeps going and companies succeed executing on it. Does anyone know the status for CRISPR medical technology? I remembering hearing about all these great applications using CaaS-9 and 13 but I haven’t really heard any new medical breakthroughs recently (though the hemophilia “cure” was awesome!).

Oh man, this is amazing news. I am surprised at how much promise mRNA has! Let’s hope it will not be too long before awful conditions like MS are consigned to history.

I've re-read the article a couple of times but I'm having trouble understanding how this works. I understand how an mRNA vaccine can teach the immune system to recognize a virus, but in the case of an autoimmune disorder, the challenge is to teach the immune system to stop attacking something, right?

How can an mRNA vaccine cause the immune system to "forget" something that it thinks is harmful?

Does anyone know if this approach would work for food allergies?

I haven't yet seen anyone mention this, but will BioNTech's / Modernas mRNA vaccine need to go through phase 1-3 trials when encoding for other proteins?

The greatest advancement with mRNA is that you can have a vaccine in under a month. But that doesn't help if for each new mRNA encoding you need 9 months worth of health & safety trials.

When I first read of the messenger RNA based vaccines I was thinking that perhaps the one good thing coming from this horrific pandemic is providing mRNA treatments the funding they needed.

I think originally BioNTech worked on cancer treatments.

In mice, but I'm not a bionerd. Is the MS mouse model closer to the actual human disease than the ALZ mouse model is?

Can anyone comment on where we would be if COVID-19 hit a few years earlier and mRNA wasn't ready for primetime?

Headline is a bit funky calling it "Covid-19 vaccine's tech", since this tech has been studied and tested for many other applications.

It seems backwards... Covid-19 vaccine is an instance of this technology, the technology is not a derivative of what they did in Covid-19 vaccine.

Great news! I wonder how much industry resistance there will be. Treating MS patients is a massive industry. Drug treatments are $100k a year currently, replacing that with a single $20 vaccine would be disruptive in the best way.

Big Pharma is likely very pro covid vaccine boon, 1) because some got a free loan to fund improvements of their own MRNA tech to catch up to Moderna's 10 year head start and 2) as an excuse to now field their MRNA tech with new vaccines and therapies when in prior years there would have been insurmountable barriers due to the FDA and lack of existing pharmacological precedent.

That undismissible popup that comes up on this page is the bane of my existence