Posted on May 10, 2023 by Aldevron

The Future of RNA: A World of Opportunity

Aldevron’s history has been shaped by the company’s ability to imagine the future of possibilities in medicine and develop the products and services to help drive those visions forward.

For me personally, this means always focusing on these questions: How do I advance science at Aldevron and across the industry? How can we improve at anticipating and solving problems for our clients? How do we make science better than it was yesterday?

Over the next 25 years, we will continue this tradition by working with our biopharmaceutical partners to anticipate trends in RNA and DNA medicines, cell and gene therapy and gene editing, and to develop solutions that will bring these innovations to patients everywhere.

Aldevron’s role supporting biopharma developers dates back to the dawn of genomics medicine. We got our start supplying DNA and proteins to biopharmaceutical companies. Given that RNA sits in the middle – it converts codes from DNA into the proteins our bodies need to stay healthy – expanding into RNA was a logical step for us.

Shortly after I joined Aldevron in 2015 as an assay development scientist, I subsequently moved into a senior scientist role, where I led the development of our mRNA manufacturing process, eventually establishing our R&D team before becoming chief scientific officer in January 2022. We started working on our mRNA product line in 2016, focusing on providing the enzymes researchers need to make RNA therapeutics.

Thanks to our early investments in mRNA, we were able to take a lead in supporting various mRNA therapies and vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, to help patients get access quickly. Aldevron supplies plasmid DNA (pDNA), which can be used as the template for mRNA vaccines and also forms the backbone of several investigational mRNA medicines in the biopharma pipeline.

Aldevron is well-positioned to drive the next generation of mRNA. I foresee a few key challenges – which, for us, represent exciting opportunities to innovate novel solutions.

RNA therapeutics are going to get more and more complex, incorporating larger genes of interest (GOIs) and even including additional therapeutic modalities all in a single drug. That means we’ll have to find innovative ways to maintain the stability of RNA, while at the same time improving manufacturing yields.

Improving the manufacturing process of RNA therapeutics will be a priority. I believe there will be significant advances in the upstream manufacturing process: the enzymes, DNA templates and reaction conditions needed to make RNA medicines. There will also be advances in downstream processing, specifically in the effort to remove immunogenic impurities from RNA drugs that can prompt adverse immune responses in patients and hamper efficacy. And there will be improvements in the design and manufacturing of the lipid nanoparticles that are often used to deliver mRNA. We are working on innovations in all of these areas that promise to improve the manufacturing of RNA therapeutics, leading to better RNA quality and a streamlined process that boosts yields.

There’s no doubt the promise of mRNA is incredible. The biopharma companies that are fueling this field into the future are working on treatments for a wide variety of diseases, including HIV, seasonal flu, cardiovascular disease and multiple cancers. Aldevron will continue to work hand-in-hand with our clients to advance every day, so they can innovate faster, and together, we can bring more treatments to patients.

Venkata Indurthi
Chief Scientific Officer