Messenger RNA can be used to stimulate T cells to fight cancer and autoimmune disease, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Put together a shelf-stable particle with a polyester shell, a homing mechanism, and mRNA instructions, and what do you have? A new technology that may be able to train your own T cells inside your body to combat some types of cancer and autoimmune disease. Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering expert Jordan Green and colleagues have shown that such an approach works in the lab.

Green: mRNA's in all of our cells. Our life depends on our mRNA. This is just giving an additional instruction for a short period of time to the right kind of cells. What we found is with certain types of targeting agents we could not only give the instruction to those cells but we could also activate them and alert them to how to function. The targeting ligand both stimulates the cell and then helps deliver the instructions. A targeting ligand is like a key on the outside of the particle and then it goes through the body bumping into all the different cells until it finds its lock that the key fits right in and then it'll enter that cell.  :34

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.