The Future of mRNA Vaccines

Colombian President Gustavo Petro stationed Colombian troops along the border with Ecuador after he claimed that the Ecuadorian military bombed a site in Colombian territory, killing at least 27 people. During a cabinet meeting, Petro said he asked President Donald Trump to discuss the matter with Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, stating. “We do not want to go to war,” he said. Illegal armed groups involved in cocaine trafficking operate along the border, but Petro said the nature of the attack—an aerial bombing—rules out their involvement. Noboa denied Petro’s claim that Ecuador was responsible for the attack, noting that while the country had conducted aerial raids on Sunday night targeting the lairs of Colombian-based drug-trafficking cartels and “narco terrorists,” its forces only struck sites within Ecuadorian territory.

The White House and Senate Democrats exchanged offers Monday and Tuesday on a deal to pass legislation funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for the remainder of the 2026 fiscal year, which runs through September 30. DHS has been shut down since February 14, when a two-week funding extension expired. On Tuesday, the White House released a letter addressed to Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Katie Britt of Alabama, agreeing to expand the use of body-worn cameras in non-undercover immigration operations, limit operations at “certain sensitive locations … like hospitals and schools,” ensure Congress can properly oversee DHS detention facilities, require non-undercover federal agents to display “visible officer identification,” and “adhere to existing law and practice of not deporting any U.S. citizen.” To learn more about the shutdown, read last Friday’s TMD.

Attorneys representing the 30-year-old Virginia resident accused of planting pipe bombs outside the Washington, D.C., headquarters of both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee on the night of January 5, 2021, requested in a legal filing that the federal judge overseeing his case dismiss the charges because he was protected by the presidential pardon Trump granted for January 6 offenders. Trump’s pardon applied to those charged with “offenses related to events that occurred at or near” the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and the suspected would-be pipe bomber’s legal team argued that such a description “unequivocally applies” to him, because his alleged actions are “in no manner … wholly independent of events at the Capitol on January 6.”

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes on Tuesday filed 20 misdemeanor criminal charges against the online prediction market platform Kalshi for allegedly operating what is effectively an illegal gambling operation, in addition to “election wagering.” “Kalshi may brand itself as a ‘prediction market,’ but what it’s actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law,” Mayes said in a statement. “No company gets to decide for itself which laws to follow.” Mayes told Arizona media that Kalshi had violated the state’s clear gaming laws, including allowing users to place bets on events such as elections and military operations. “Those things are just illegal in the state of Arizona,” she said. A Kalshi spokeswoman said the accusations brought by Arizona are “meritless” and “seriously flawed,” while accusing state officials of engaging in “gamesmanship.”

“Personalized medicine” has become a buzzword in the health care industry in recent years, as doctors and scientists increasingly adopt new technologies to tailor medical treatments to each patient’s specific needs. Now, the field has its very own poster dog.

Rosie, a mutt rescued from the Australian bush in 2019 and adopted by tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2024. But after Conyngham, an artificial intelligence expert, utilized specialized programs and the work of a team of Australian researchers to produce a customized cancer vaccine for Rosie using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, Rosie’s tumors began to shrink and disappear.

It’s the first time a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine has ever been used for a dog, University of New South Wales researchers say. It’s also a striking example of how mRNA technology is reshaping the future of medicine for humans too. But the implementation of mRNA technology and the treatments it enables still face medical—and now political—hurdles.

mRNA technology—using messenger RNA, essentially a sequence of biological code, to deliver instructions to the body’s cells and train the immune system to recognize and attack specific mutations or foreign invaders, such as cancer cells or viruses—has been under development for decades. But its medical application became much more practical through Nobel Prize-winning research by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania, who in 2005 discovered a way to introduce mRNA into the body without triggering a destructive immune response.

With that advance, Karikó and Weissman unlocked the two massive medical advantages of mRNA: customization and speed.

“The trick to this is that mRNAs are natural parts of the human body, and they pass away from the body very quickly,” Jeff Coller, a professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, told TMD. “That’s really important because you don’t want a drug to be permanent. You don’t want to take a drug, and then constantly in your body have Tylenol, for example.” Instead, he explained, mRNA technology enables targeted, temporary treatments for diseases such as cancer and rare genetic disorders at the individual level.

Vaccine development is also accelerated by mRNA technology. “As soon as we understand the sequence of the virus and what we have to target, usually the envelope proteins, then we can quickly make vaccines,” Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at the Yale University School of Medicine, told TMD. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA technology enabled Moderna researchers to finalize the design of their vaccine only two days after Chinese scientists released the COVID-19 genome to the world. Traditional vaccine development can take months or even years.

“The real advantage of using mRNA is when speed is really important,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told TMD.

Conyngham took full advantage of both kinds of breakthroughs to help his dog Rosie. Distraught by the fact that chemotherapy for his dog was failing to work, he paid for a research team at the University of New South Wales to sequence Rosie’s DNA, then used AlphaFold—an AI system that predicts the structure of proteins—to suggest a way to attack his dog’s cancer cells using mRNA. Her advanced tumors have now halved in size, according to Rachel Allavena, a canine immunotherapy professor at the University of Queensland’s veterinary school, whose research team administered the vaccine.

For dogs, mRNA treatments like these are novel. “I haven’t come across anything like it,” Allavena told TMD. “The fact that she had such advanced disease and she got such a good response makes me very, very hopeful.” But while Conyngham’s specific AI expertise and dogged initiative certainly helped develop the vaccine, Allavena noted that Rosie’s treatment was a group effort that still relied on highly specialized scientific expertise. “It’s not a basement vaccine … it’s a really high-tech vaccine,” she said.

More than 100 clinical trials for similar vaccines using mRNA to target a variety of human cancers have been conducted. “On the human side, they’re much more advanced,” David Vail, a doctor who studies the comparative treatment of cancer in animals and humans at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, told TMD. While off-the-shelf cancer vaccines for both dogs and humans already exist, custom mRNA vaccines offer the advantage of tailored formulations for each patient’s tumors.

For all their promise, mRNA treatments have real limitations. Not all cancers respond to mRNA vaccines, and the vaccines are most effective when used as part of a larger battery of therapies. “Probably less than 10 percent of people that are given just an mRNA personalized vaccine will have a robust response,” Vail said, adding that the treatments should be used in combination with other established treatments.

Cost is also a major concern. “Personalized immunotherapy for a single patient is presently an expensive option, both for humans and for dogs,” Mark Mamula, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and the founder of TheraJan, a company developing a canine cancer vaccine, told TMD.

Bringing costs down will likely also require the Food and Drug Administration to rethink its approach to approving individualized therapies. “Commercialization in the marketplace just breaks down because we’re used to the FDA approving, testing, and marketing drugs at scale,” Coller explained, making the cost of each custom therapy inordinately expensive for the average person. For the tens of millions of Americans who have one of the roughly 10,000 documented rare diseases, “we don’t have a way to bring those therapies forward in a way that the cost is less than, like, $3 million per patient,” Coller said.

The Trump administration doesn’t appear poised to ease regulatory burdens on companies working on this technology. In August, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the cancellation of $500 million in HHS contracts that supported mRNA vaccine research through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Then, in early February, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator refused to review an application for approval of Moderna’s mRNA-based flu vaccine, which had entered the final stages of trials before Kennedy’s appointment, in a rare reversal on a study the agency had already agreed to. Only a White House intervention convinced the FDA to allow the final approval process to go forward.

The Department of Defense’s Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Defense—which was already funding multiple mRNA vaccine projects—stepped in to at least partially cover the shortfalls for some projects defunded by Kennedy’s HHS. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also provides funding for mRNA vaccines targeting diseases that affect livestock. But this only covers a fraction of what BARDA offered to researchers. And while some other governments, like the European Union, and private nonprofits, like the Gates Foundation, have ramped up broader vaccine funding—some of which has benefited stalled mRNA projects—their investments weren’t designed to replace BARDA’s targeted support for the technology and haven’t done so. Pharmaceutical companies can’t fill the gap either, Adalja told TMD: “When it comes to infectious disease countermeasures for biothreats, [the funding cut] was basically a fatal blow.”

Richard H. Hughes IV, a member at the law firm Epstein Becker Green and a former executive at Moderna, told TMD that the message sent by the government’s decision, not just the money lost, is critical. “I can tell you that years and years of effort went into developing that technology, with and without government partnership … because they believed they would have a market; that there would be a recognized public health need, that regulators would act in good faith,” he said. “What you’re seeing are very clear signals that the opposite is becoming true.”

Others in the industry seem to agree. “You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said at the World Economic Forum in January, while announcing that his company had no plans to invest in new late-stage infectious disease vaccine trials.

“I think the U.S. risks a future when the cutting edge of biotech innovation no longer runs through San Francisco or Boston, but through Beijing and Shanghai,” Sam Howell, an associate fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, told TMD.

Even though they currently face political headwinds, mRNA vaccines and therapies offer immense promise. Though Rosie the dog isn’t cancer-free, Conyngham says she now enjoys a far higher quality of life, able to walk around and appear on daytime TV. For humans, last year 6-month-old KJ Muldoon began receiving a bespoke CRISPR gene-editing treatment, delivered via mRNA, at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for a rare metabolic condition known as severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, which kills half of all babies who suffer from it in their early infancy and causes severe developmental delays and liver problems in others. Nearly a year later, “Baby KJ” is healthy and thriving.

“You’ve got a whole population of scientists around the world who are inspired to start using this technology to do all sorts of interesting interventions,” Coller said. “But they’re experiencing significant headwinds in the United States because of the federal landscape. That’s just the reality.”

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