Boundless Possibilities
Safer and Better Therapies and Vaccines
What if treatments and vaccines for some of the world’s deadliest diseases and viruses required fewer doses, were less expensive to manufacture, and produced more effective results?
Mark Grinstaff has made that his life’s work. Grinstaff, BU’s William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, leads pioneering research on self-amplifying RNA (saRNA), a medical technology that leverages the body’s immune response to fight disease.
“We’re using the body’s own machinery, its own cells, to produce protein therapeutics,” says Grinstaff, who is also a professor of biomedical engineering and materials sciences in the College of Engineering and a professor of chemistry at Arts & Sciences.
Where the widely-used messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID vaccine requires a high dose to achieve the desired immunization—and occasionally comes with side effects—an saRNA vaccine created by Grinstaff and his team for a research study has virus-fighting proteins that replicate automatically in the body over time. “We were able to cut the dose by about a hundredfold and get the same type of performance. If you can use less drug to get the same outcome, we think that’ll be both beneficial to patients, but also hopefully lower the cost of manufacturing.”
In 2024, the National Science Foundation awarded Grinstaff with one of six inaugural Trailblazer Engineering Impact Awards, which came with $3 million to continue researching and testing the saRNA technology for vaccines and other applications.
Cancer treatment is another promising application of saRNA technology. Standard treatments like chemotherapy and radiation kill healthy cells alongside cancer cells, leaving patients sicker as they combat their disease. Grinstaff sees a future where patients don’t have to be sick to get well. A quarterly injection could produce a protein that seeks out just the cancer cells. “Once it binds to the tumor cell, it will recruit an immune cell to come to that tumor cell and kill it,” Grinstaff says. “[The protein] acts as a molecular glue. We’re taking advantage of the body’s own mechanisms to fight a disease.”