Are those those same vaccines developed using American tax payer dollars ?
‘Zat you?
Objectively, claiming the US deserves all the credit or funded all the mRNA research into vaccines is overly self-congratulatory and reductionist.
Check your bias, buddy.
One example:
Katalin Karikó is a Hungarian biochemist who specializes in RNA-mediated mechanisms. Her research has been the development of in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapies.
She co-founded and was CEO of RNARx from 2006 to 2013. Since 2013, she has been associated with BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals, first as a vice president and promoted to senior vice president in 2019. She also is an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
And:
That vaccine has now been authorized in the UK, Canada, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the US. Karikó's work also inspired the founding of Moderna, the US biotech company developing a competing coronavirus shot.
And:
Several other mRNA-therapeutics companies say that they have proprietary formulations of modified RNA molecules as well, although few are willing to discuss details. “In mRNAs, everything is deathly quiet,” says Ali Mortazavi, chief executive of Silence Therapeutics, an RNA biotech in London. “There’s really no understanding of who owns what, so nobody wants to disclose anything — and we’re included in that.”
…
Other mRNA-therapeutics companies are persevering, and are getting promising data from studies in large animals. CureVac, a German company that spun off from the University of Tübingen in 2000, has found that it can get injected mRNA past the immune defences of pigs and monkeys by picking molecules with optimal sequences rather than by modifying their nucleosides. So far, CureVac has struck deals with several big pharmaceutical companies and raised around $220 million in equity, including $52 million secured from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in March this year.
Dublin-based rare-disease specialist Shire, in collaboration with Ethris of Planegg, Germany, has achieved targeted lung delivery of mRNA in a pig model for cystic fibrosis. “For a huge idea” like mRNA, says Michael Heartlein, head of MRNA therapeutics at Shire, “I think there’s a lot of room for different technologies and different players”.
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