Scientists discover chemical marker that could unlock future therapeutic uses of mRNA

An international research team led by Professor Kataro Asano of Hiroshima University's Graduate School of Integrative Sciences living in Japan, and Kansas State University in the United States, set out to find new ways to artificially induce mRNA responses in ways that could ultimately lead to therapeutic outcomes that expand The success of mRNA-based vaccines for COVID-19 and opens up new possibilities in a range of possible gene therapies

Asano and his research team focused on a biochemical process called chemical modification, which adds chemical tags to RNA bases that correspond to the genetic letters of the blueprint for life

In animals, including humans, the mRNA is called the AUG start codon and plays a role in protein production, the universal codon for the "zipper" of RNA genes

Apart from AUG, few other codons activate mRNA as well as AUG

They found a common tendency for translation efficiency to change when a non-aug start codon received a specific chemical tag

Asano hopes that the medical industry will take notice of this new body of data and continue further research into how chemically modified RNA can be used to generate synthetic expression switches -- in this way stimulating humans in a highly targeted manner and animal translation activities

Asano further explained that so far, no significant risks have been identified with the long-term use of various mRNA vaccines

Journal Reference :

1. Yoshihiko Fujita, Takeru Kameda, Chingakham Ranjit Singh, Whitney Pepper, Ariana Cecil, Madelyn Hilgers, Mackenzie Thornton, Izumi Asano, Carter Moravek, Yuichi Togashi, Hirohide Saito, Katsura Asano.