The 2006 Nobel Prize for Medicine in Milan for a conference for students and researchers of the San Raffaele University and Friday 14 October live on time.news from Bergamo Scienza
On 12 October the reimbursement in Italy of the first anti-cholesterol drug based on the IRNA technique (RNA interference) was approved and on 13 October Craig Mello, one of the fathers of this discovery for which he received the Nobel Prize in 2006, held a lecture for students and researchers at the San Raffaele University in Milan while 14 spoke to the public on the occasion of Bergamo Scienza at 21 (live on time.news) to explain what this technique consists of, which promises to be one of the major revolutions in medicine in the years to come. Conceptually simple he minimizes Mello (American of Portuguese ancestry and for a sixth from Campania, he is keen to emphasize). It consists in preparing a small, precise, molecule of Rna (one of the two nucleic acids of our cells together with DNA), administering it to our body so that it interferes, as the name of the technique says, with the production of certain proteins. A bit like the mRna vaccines that have been talked about so much in the last two years? No – Mello replies -, different: vaccines are injected because they induce some of our cells to synthesize a viral protein to a limited extent so that it is “exposed” on their membranes and recognized as foreign by our body, which will thus produce antibodies against it. . In this way, when the virus arrives, we will have our defenses ready to neutralize it because they will recognize it precisely because it also has that protein. In the case of iRna, on the other hand, the molecule we administer generally serves to prevent harmful or wrong proteins from being produced by our cells. The RNA that we inject “couples” with our RNA sequences, “neutralizing” them and in this sense it acts more like a drug than a vaccine. We have known the mechanism for a long time but the problem that RNA once administered is short-lived because it is degraded soon, but now, thanks to some chemical modifications, we can direct it where it is needed and keep it stable for months, during which it will continue to perform. its action. The main advantages of this strategy – the scientist points out – are that it is quick to develop and much cheaper than others, so in theory it could find many applications, for example also as an antiviral, to “ask” our RNA to prevent the virus to make our cells synthesize one of its key proteins, so that it cannot replicate and then spread.
October 13, 2022 (change October 13, 2022 | 17:39)
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