Empowered Patient Podcast Using mRNA Vaccines to Effectively and Safely Target Infectious Disease and Cancer with Dr. Thomas VanCott and Dr. Romain Micol Combined Therapeutics
Dr. Romain Micol, CEO, and Dr. Tom VanCott, Chief Scientific Officer, at Combined Therapeutics, are excited about the opportunities to design mRNA vaccines that target specific tissue cells to restrict protein expression and have stronger potency in the fight against infectious disease and cancer. They have designed their vaccine platform to keep the vaccine antigen expression at the injection site, protecting the liver, kidney, and heart.
Romain explains, "So mRNA vaccines are highly effective both for infectious diseases and, more recently, to treat cancer. It's an ideal technology that is relatively easy to make and to manufacture. It could be very rapid and can get expression in vivo where protein would be folded properly. We can currently use the mRNA vaccine to deliver multiple materials to prevent infectious diseases and also cure cancer."
"The main challenge we see at Combined Therapeutics, both for vaccines for infectious disease and for cancer treatment, is in their biodistribution and potency. Our platform at Combined Therapeutics is a proprietary technology that enables us to focus protein expression in specific tissue cells and prevent off-target expression in selected cell tissue. At the moment, our R&D program covers both oncology and infectious disease."
Thomas elaborates, "What we've done here at Combined Therapeutics is we're taking advantage of something called micro RNAs. Now, what are micro RNAs? A lot of people don't know about them, but they're really just small RNA molecules that are naturally present throughout the body. They're actually fairly small molecules. They're about 22 nucleotides in size."
"But what's really important is that they're distributed differentially throughout the body. So, if you look at the lungs or the heart or the muscles, you'll see a different array of micro RNAs that are expressed in each one of those tissues, and that is exactly what we take advantage of. What we do in our mRNA is engineer into it what we call these blockers. And what's a blocker? A blocker is really a binding site for the micro RNA."
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