Empowered Patient Podcast Advanced RNA Technology Cost-Effectively Creating mRNA Vaccines for Viruses and Cancer with Steven Reed HDT Bio
Steve Reed, Co-Founder, President, and CEO of HDT Bio, has spent his life focusing on tropical diseases and points out how the cost of developing and manufacturing vaccines determines access for a global population. HDT Bio was founded to develop more cost-effective technology to induce broader immune responses to various diseases. Their advanced RNA platform AMPLIFY is a technology applied to developing mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases and a therapeutic vaccine to help prevent recurrence and prolong survival from cancer.
Steve elaborates, "COVID was something that came up right after we founded the company, and so the National Institute of Health asked us and funded us to develop a novel platform that could complement the platforms already in place for mRNA vaccines. Other indications that are incredibly important include other viruses. They're always coming up, and they're always mutating. But you probably read in the news about fungal infections on the increase in the United States and other countries."
"The AMPLIFY technology is an RNA platform that expands in a limited way once it's introduced into the cell and then enables you to use a much lower amount of RNA. So that's significant in terms of cost, as well as safety. And then to be able to deliver the RNA, you have to protect it into a formulation, and the formulation we've developed is one that can be mass-produced at low cost and is very safe."
"Back in the '90s and 2000s, when molecular biology, and monoclonal antibodies, those technologies became widely used and understood, we all naively thought that the road to a parasitic disease vaccine would be relatively straightforward. And in some ways, while the technology has enabled such vaccines, the practical limitations have stopped progress or severely limited it."
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