Breath of Life

Talented sports people are sometimes ineffective until a great coach provides clear instructions that get the most out of them. And like promising but unguided prodigies, our body’s cells often have great capacity for healing illnesses in the body, but lack the proper motivation to do so. Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a molecule that can induce cells to take particular actions, so holds promise for treating many diseases and exploiting our cells’ full potential, but it’s not easy to get it to the right place. Now researchers have created an inhalable form of mRNA, that could lead to new treatments for lung diseases such as cancer or cystic fibrosis. They successfully made mouse lung cells produce a green protein (pictured) after inhaling particles (yellow). If they can also prompt the production of therapeutic proteins, our own lung cells could become drug factories, producing an antidote right where it’s needed most.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Asha Patel, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT
• Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
• Research published in Advanced Materials, January 2019