drug-development
3 free lessons tagged drug-development across Science. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
Vaccines, Cancer, and Beyond
What the mRNA platform can actually treat. This lesson covers preventive vaccines, personalized cancer vaccines built from a patient's own tumor mutations (with the Moderna-Merck mRNA-4157 melanoma results), and the protein-replacement and cell-therapy frontiers, plus the honest limits that still constrain the field.
mRNA as a Programmable Drug
Instead of manufacturing a protein, an mRNA medicine delivers the instructions and lets your own cells build it. This lesson covers the anatomy of a therapeutic mRNA, the immune problem that stalled the field for decades, and the modified-nucleoside breakthrough by Kariko and Weissman that made it work, the reason mRNA is a programmable platform.
From bench to bedside: clinical trials and approval
The phased structure of drug development from preclinical work through phase IV surveillance, what each phase actually establishes, the 90% attrition rate and where it lives, the difference between surrogate and hard clinical endpoints, and what regulatory approval pathways guarantee.