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messenger RNA

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In the media

Unherd: Why third jabs are inevitable

Amin Khan, Head of Vaccines at GreenLight Biosciences, speaks to Unherd a wider piece about why third jabs are inevitable.

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Credit: Unherd/Amarjeet Kumar

Amin Khan, Head of Vaccines at GreenLight Biosciences, speaks to Unherd about the ability to rapidly rollout new mRNA vaccines in a wider piece about why third jabs are inevitable. Extracts below:

Amin Khan, head of vaccines at the biotech firm GreenLight, says that you can get a new variant-specific mRNA vaccine ready to go in a few weeks. And if the new version simply targets a slightly modified version of the spike protein, as the existing vaccines do, it won’t need much in the way of testing and regulatory approval. Changing your manufacturing system is more complicated, “but within two or three months, you can get a new variant to the market”.

Playing whack-a-mole with new variants isn’t a long-term solution, though. The hope is that “third-generation” vaccines will be capable of covering all the existing variants and most foreseeable future ones. But, says Khan, that’s a bit more complicated. A more complete version might target other parts of the virus than the spike protein; that would mean a much more rigorous testing and approval regime, and it may take months longer to get such a vaccine to market.

Read the full article here.

Find out more about how GreenLight manufactures RNA here.

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Investors, Press releases

GreenLight acquires Bayer’s topical RNA Intellectual Property portfolio

An RNA product to protect bees against varroa mites

GreenLight Biosciences today announced that they have acquired rights to portions of Bayer’s topical RNA Intellectual Property portfolio. These assets include bee health capabilities to protect against Varroa mites, a major threat to honeybees.

The RNA-based Varroa mite control advance allows beekeepers to directly target the Varroa mite without harming the honeybee, a critical advantage to other treatments on the market today.

RNA’s potential for improving plant, animal and human health has been known for years, but widespread commercial use hasn’t previously been possible, due to RNA’s cost of production, and slow production time.

GreenLight’s proprietary, cell-free method enables the company to produce low-cost, high-quality, high-scale RNA in a safe and environmentally friendly manner.

“GreenLight’s manufacturing capability, along with their technical expertise in RNA applications, made them the ideal candidate to move these technologies forward,” said Shaun Selness, Bayer Head of Emerging Technologies. “Bayer’s project team made significant technical progress over the past several years on an RNA-based Varroa mite control concept and GreenLight is best positioned to bring a cost-effective product to market.”

GreenLight is committed to innovating sustainable solutions for plant health, human health, and animal health, and to making these solutions affordable and accessible.

“GreenLight is working to address humanity’s greatest challenges, from producing vaccines to protecting bees and other beneficial insects like ladybugs. The Covid vaccine has shown just how well scientific advances can be used to protect our health. We can use the same advances to help keep bees healthy – as if we are inoculating whole hives of bees,” said Andrey Zarur, CEO and founder of GreenLight Biosciences. “It is an honor to acquire the rights to Bayer’s groundbreaking technical work, so that we can bring it to beekeepers everywhere.”

You can find out more about GreenLight’s work on bees here.

Update: The Economist has written up GreenLight’s work on bees here.

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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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