Feng Zhang un­veils a new tech­nol­o­gy to po­ten­tial­ly de­liv­er mR­NA, gene ther­a­py, CRISPR and more

MIT star re­searcher and CRISPR pi­o­neer Feng Zhang put a new pa­per out Thurs­day in Sci­ence de­tail­ing how a new tech­nol­o­gy could al­ter a field that’s al­ready proven game-chang­ing through­out the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic.

Zhang and his team have de­vel­oped a po­ten­tial new de­liv­ery method for mR­NA ther­a­peu­tics, they re­port­ed in their pa­per, work­ing out a way for hu­man pro­teins to bind to their own mR­NA and pack­age them­selves in a pro­tec­tive cap­sule. That ap­proach dif­fers from the tech­nol­o­gy used for de­liv­er­ing the mR­NA Covid-19 vac­cines or for ther­a­pies that re­ly on de­liv­er­ing ge­net­ic ma­te­r­i­al in­to cells, such as gene ther­a­py and CRISPR-Cas9  — all of which uti­lize lipid nanopar­ti­cles or vi­ral vec­tors.

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