mRNA COVID vaccines saved lives and won a Nobel — what's next for the technology?

In just three short years, mRNA vaccines have saved millions of lives, achieved household recognition and, as of this week, become the subject of a Nobel Prize. Yet the field shows no signs of slowing down.

In the wake of the technology’s dramatic success in generating quick-turnaround COVID-19 vaccines, investors have poured billions of dollars into expanding mRNA’s therapeutic reach.

This influx of cash promises to fuel the research and infrastructure needed to deploy mRNA medicines in ways that could transform public health by tackling hard-to-treat infectious diseases, cancers and rare genetic disorders.

“The sky’s the limit,” says Matthias Stephan, an immunologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. “For whatever you want to correct, or whatever you want to treat, there could be an mRNA medicine — that’s the excitement.”

Continue reading about mRNA medicines on the horizon at Nature.