Messenger RNA (mRNA) is the specific type of RNA that acts as a messenger molecule, carrying instructions from a cell's DNA to protein-production units known as ribosomes. The ability to harness mRNA has given medicine an enormously powerful "platform" technology: scientists can instruct the body to manufacture therapeutic proteins, train the immune system to fight diseases (including cancers) and silence harmful signals in cells, such as faulty instructions caused by a genetic disease or genetic information from a virus seeking to replicate itself.
The fastest vaccines to arrive during the covid-19 pandemic were jabs built from mRNA designed to teach the body how to fight off the disease-causing virus. By late 2021 mRNA vaccines had saved an estimated 7.7m lives globally, including most of the 3m Americans whom the Commonwealth Fund estimates were saved by vaccines before 2023. Donald Trump launched Operation Warp Speed, a programme that started the race to deliver vaccines.
America is the global leader in mRNA-vaccine research. According to Airfinity, a life-sciences data firm, it is home to trials for almost 40% of mRNA vaccine candidates. In the years prior to the pandemic the American government spent $337m funding research related to mRNA technology that would eventually lead to the covid-19 vaccines, a figure unmatched by any other country.
Interest in picking up displaced mRNA expertise has been reported from Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. Britain is actively competing for it. Peter Piot, a professor of global health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a former adviser to Ursula von der Leyen, has called on the European Union to launch a special initiative to fill the gap.
mRNA is being developed not only for pandemic-busting vaccines but also for medicines targeting infectious diseases, rare genetic illnesses and cancer. The rapidity with which mRNA can be designed and manufactured makes it ideally suited for creating personalised medicines. Personalised cancer vaccines, for instance, are a promising mRNA-based technology to treat tumours.
Therapeutic antibodies are another application. ModeX, a biotech firm based in Massachusetts, is engineering mRNA that, when introduced into the body, instructs it to create antibodies able to attach to more than one location on a given virus, making them more potent.
A related but distinct technology, RNA interference (RNAi), uses tiny RNA molecules that interfere with the production of viral proteins in the body, potentially blocking a virus from replicating.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Trump's health secretary, terminated 22 mRNA-related contracts worth nearly $500m across academia and industry, citing safety concerns that scientists have discredited. His department also cancelled $766m in funding for a late-stage human mRNA vaccine against bird flu and work on five subtypes of influenza with pandemic potential, and gave up the rights to purchase bird-flu shots from Moderna. Research into filoviruses such as Ebola also lost funding, as did ModeX's therapeutic-antibody work and Tiba Biotech's RNAi-based flu treatment.
Rick Bright, former boss of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the division of the health department that had funded the grants, wrote in the New York Times that the decision undercut "one of the most significant medical advances in decades".
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026 the boss of Moderna said the company would invest less in clinical trials because of the administration's scepticism.
Researchers are developing mRNA-based "mosaic" vaccines that could protect against broad families of viruses rather than individual strains. Pamela Bjorkman of the California Institute of Technology and colleagues designed a mosaic coronavirus vaccine made of tiny molecular footballs with 60 surfaces, each studded with spike-protein fragments from eight different sarbecoviruses. The vaccine trained animals' immune systems to target the conserved (least-changing) parts of spike proteins and protected them against the original SARS virus, which was not included in the mosaic. The team is developing an mRNA version of the jab: strings of mRNA encoding multiple spike-protein variants, plus instructions for assembling mosaic balls from the cell's own membrane using vesicle-budding machinery.
When George W. Bush's administration restricted funding for embryonic stem-cell research in 2001, some scientists moved abroad and Britain became a global hub for that research. The cuts also pushed American researchers to innovate in other areas, leading to the advancement of pluripotent stem cells.
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