mrna
4 free lessons tagged mrna 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.
The Delivery Problem: Lipid Nanoparticles
A therapeutic mRNA is destroyed in the body within minutes and cannot cross a cell membrane on its own. This lesson explains the lipid nanoparticle that solves it: its four components, the ionizable-lipid trick that releases mRNA inside the cell, where the particles travel after injection, and the cold-chain limitation that follows.
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.
DNA, mRNA, protein: the central dogma
The flow of information from DNA through mRNA to protein, what mutations actually change, why single-base changes can have outsized consequences, and the structural reason genome editing aims at DNA specifically.