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In the media

In the media

GenEdge: GreenLight Strives for Global RNA Equity

Martha Ortega-Valle, co-founder of GreenLight Biosciences, is interviewed by GenEdge to discuss how RNA equity can help solve the problems of today and the future.

Martha Ortega-Valle, co-founder of GreenLight Biosciences, is interviewed by GenEdge to discuss how RNA equity can help solve the problems of today and the future. Extracts from the interview are below:

We were coming from a solution that could manufacture in a very integrated way mRNA for agriculture. We thought those learnings were going to play an important role to accelerate the RNA space. We decided to do it, not only the manufacturing challenge but the pipeline development….

We are seeing that manufacturing and having enough vaccine doses for everyone not only in the developed world—it’s becoming an issue. Even today in Europe, countries are struggling for vaccines and doses…

We have a unified way in the sense that we think RNA can solve very important problems in the agricultural space, the human health space, and even animal health…

The beauty of that is that you’ll always have one single way of producing that molecule — one platform, a million products. That’s giving you R&D acceleration and then moving them through regulatory and commercial scale…

In ten years, I’d like to have advanced therapies using the RNA platform that can cure or alleviate diseases that don’t have good solutions. We could think about sickle cell disease, HIV, and other important diseases…

We need to make sure to integrate the local people not only in terms of getting their vaccines but also empowers them to have biomanufacturing as part of their industrial endeavors. There are wonderful universities doing great work in those locations that now have access to generate clinical materials in a facility that is local. So, it’s bringing top technologies to those locations.

Read the full article here.

Find out more about how GreenLight manufactures RNA here.

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In the media

The National: Africa needs to be self-reliant in vaccine production

Andrey Zarur, CEO of GreenLight Biosciences, writes an opinion piece for The National about how vaccine production needs to progress for the world to recover from the pandemic.

Andrey Zarur, CEO of GreenLight Biosciences, writes an opinion piece for The National about how vaccine production needs to progress, particularly in Africa, for the world to recover from the pandemic. Some extracts from the piece are below.

The pandemic will not end until everyone is vaccinated – and quickly. At the current pace, full vaccination will not occur until the end of 2022, but we must find a way to make enough vaccines, about 15 billion doses, before serious vaccine-resistant variants overtake us. That’s daunting, but it is possible to meet the challenge.

Some countries may share their vaccines with others, but to produce vaccines continually and efficiently, we need production sites distributed around the world. GreenLight’s novel RNA manufacturing process – quick to start, built for scale, and using small bioreactors – may be part of the solution. We are partnering with governments, multilateral institutions and companies on all continents to accelerate pandemic response.

Vaccines for Covid-19 cannot yet be manufactured in Africa. Local manufacturing – that is to say, a factory on the continent itself – would help meet the demand and increase the pace of vaccinations. The Covax initiative plans to send 600 million doses to Africa, enough for only about 20 per cent of its population; so far only 20 million have been delivered. Africa is, essentially, at the back of the line.

The last year has been a showcase for the power of science and of human ingenuity. To go from identifying a pandemic virus to getting a vaccine for that virus into millions of arms within a year is extraordinary, when the normal process takes a decade or more. But to fight this deadly virus and all its variants requires the agility and ingenuity to equip every country with the tools it needs to stay victorious.

Read the full article here.

Find out more about how GreenLight manufactures RNA here.

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Elemental: All about mRNA

Marta Ortega-Valle, founder of GreenLight Biosciences, talks to Elemental about mRNA and its potential to treat or prevent a whole range of conditions.

Marta Ortega-Valle, founder of GreenLight Biosciences, talks to Elemental about mRNA and its potential to treat or prevent a whole range of conditions in the future. Extracts from the article are below:

“In a way, we can produce medicines inside the body,” says Marta Ortega-Valle, founder of GreenLight, a biotech company that manufactures lab-produced RNA. “We could, instead of manufacturing proteins outside of patients, create them inside the body, using your own cells and the same system your body already has.”…

The vaccines may be the first publicly available pharmaceuticals to use mRNA, but they won’t be the last. Not by a long shot. GreenLight is currently working with the Gates Foundation to develop an mRNA-based treatment for sickle cell anemia. Research has been done into the potential for it to be used as an anti-aging therapy. The list of conditions and diseases that could theoretically be treated or prevented using mRNA vaccines and medicines is long…

Ortega-Valle and many in the science community believe the next frontier of medicine is based in mRNA. And now we’re expected to get there a lot faster. “I think that we’re experiencing an acceleration that was not in the plan,” she says. “My guess is that without the pandemic, a commercial vaccine based on mRNA would have taken many years, if it ever happened. Now we’ve done it, and it opens the door to more.”

Read the full article here.

Find out more about how GreenLight manufactures RNA here.

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