Better Beer.

The eerie prescience of the Afghanistan Study Group.

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1. Using messenger RNA, or mRNA, to get the immune system to mount a prolonged and aggressive attack on cancer cells — while leaving healthy cells alone — has been a major challenge. The MIT spinout Strand Therapeutics is attempting to solve that problem with an advanced class of mRNA molecules that are designed to sense what type of cells they encounter in the body and to express therapeutic proteins only once they have entered diseased cells. “It’s about finding ways to deal with the signal-to-noise ratio, the signal being expression in the target tissue and the noise being expression in the non-target tissue,” Strand CEO Jacob Becraft PhD ’19 explains. “Our technology amplifies the signal to express more proteins for longer while at the same time effectively eliminating the mRNA’s off-target expression.” (Source: news.mit.edu)