Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a molecule that provides blueprints for cells to make a protein that may be needed by the body. Though around for nearly 60 years before COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan, China, it didn’t get a lot of attention from government-funding agencies, where the grant system most often means experiments likely to work rather than anything revolutionary,(1)

That all changed when Moderna said they could make a COVID-19 vaccine fast, they just needed the bloated federal government and its need to make companies spend 18 months getting approval for a font color on a product label to instead get out of the way. The Trump administration did just that and by the end of 2020 it was being rushed to those on the medical front lines.(2)

Without progressives who dominate all of environmentalism and almost 90% of career government jobs lined up against it, the way they lined up against technology like CRISPR, RNAi, and GMOs, mRNA is being hailed as the breakthrough of the century.(3)

A new study is certainly impressive. It’s EXPLORATORY, if cell cultures were enough we’d have 10,000 cures for cancer by now(4) but while most fizzle away (last year a small pilot study claimed a breakthrough in glioblastoma) lots of good things also started with cell cultures.

If this work in pancreatic cancer, a real nasty one, holds up, it will be revolutionary. It certainly looks promising. The mRNA induce functional T-cells specifically a for a type of pancreatic cancer with few mutations. After three year, 75% of the patients remained cancer-free.

Since it is exploratory, it should be noted again this was not a randomized clinical trial. It had a control group but before patients and families get too optimistic.

NOTES

(1) They’re right to be cautious, a failed experiment could be the end of your R01 career. A key voice for mRNA vaccines in American science academia didn’t even have her own lab, she couldn’t get a grant to work on it and had to take repeat post-doc jobs at low pay to help better-funded groups. The Trump administration taking a machete to government bloat may get academics who are 94% determined to be voices of opposition to all Republicans – even though Republicans historically fund science better than Democrats – to get back to being nonpartisan trusted guides for the public. Most have not been for decades but they felt like they had qualified immunity from political blowback.

They’d have resisted any changes to funding, they even weirdly now protest limits on what universities can extract from scientists for light bills and “administration” despite complaining about universities robbing them for decades to build new buildings for someone else. With an axe going against everything they will advocate for very sensible limits and guidelines they’d have said doomed science in the past. 

(2) In overt scientization of politics, Democrats, including Vice-President Biden campaigning for the White House job, said Republicans were risking lives by releasing untested vaccines on the market. This was after they had gotten allied journalists to repeat claims that the Republican who said we needed to cut travel from China and was called racist and xenophobic for that was blamed for…not banning travel. After they won the election by convincing basically 10,000 voters that the guy who said we needed to ban travel while Democratic Mayors were telling residents to run out to bars for one last drink, Democrats flipped from dominating anti-vaccine beliefs since 1998 to loving them. And Republicans, where states like Alabama and Mississippi had almost no exemptions, decided vaccines were bad.

So bad that anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., JD, a former environmental lawyer for Natural Resources Defense Council, is now hailed as a hero by America’s right-wing.

(3) We shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves, though it is fun to see clueless critics on social media claim no one should ever want mRNA in their bodies – because they don’t know enough biology to know mRNA is in every cell of our bodies every minute of our lives. 

(4) Sorry, activists and corporate journalists who need to write about Miracle Cures and Scary Chemicals every week, cell cultures don’t settle anything, nor do mouse studies or epidemiological correlation using surveys. They’re all EXPLORATORY, though the Biden administration added a whole lot of those epidemiologists to advance its agenda against science inside EPA and the various Services, until chemists, biologists, and toxicologists – you know, scientists – say it is real.