Moderna and CytomX Therapeutics, a cancer drug company, will collaborate to develop investigational mRNA-based therapies, the companies said Jan. 5.
mRNA, or messenger RNA, was discovered decades ago but wasn't deployed in vaccine jabs until 2020, according to Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins. In the past few years, mRNA has been used in pharmaceutical products for infectious diseases, immuno-oncology, rare diseases, cardiovascular diseases and autoimmune diseases, according to Moderna.
With this partnership, Moderna and CytomX Therapeutics will work to combine mRNA technology with the latter's Probody technology, which "enables proteins to be activated locally in diseased tissue while remaining masked in systemic circulation," the news release said. "These advances open up the strategy of encoding potent, masked biologics with mRNA, for the potential treatment of a wide range of diseases."