PITTSBURGH — While the Covid-19 vaccines were developed far from Pittsburgh, a lab at Carnegie Mellon University is making advances in the delivery of the same type of messenger RNA technology that made the first vaccines possible to battle other diseases.
The second day of the Precision Medicine World Conference, held in downtown Pittsburgh, began with examples of how the Covid-19 pandemic had changed the region and the world — and BioNTech founders Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci and a leading mRNA researcher at CMU spoke of the advances that are in the pipeline using the technology that essentially teaches the body how to fight invaders like the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19.
That could mean life changing breakthroughs for cancer treatment, both fighting en masse like the Covid-19 vaccine and also the potential, under clinical trial right now, for customized therapies to delivered at the cellular level that would be tuned to target the genetics of the particular type of cancer or rare disease.