RNA immunogenicity

Current mRNA preparations contain immunogenic side products. Although such side products can act as an adjuvant in mRNA vaccines, they continue to impede the development of mRNA therapeutics in other areas, such as protein replacement therapy. We want to identify these immunogenic side products' chemical/sequence features and understand how the human innate immune system senses them.

This work lies at the interface of multiple fields –– the fundamental biochemistry of RNA, immunology, cell biology of endocytosis, and mRNA therapeutics. Our research tackles this problem using various techniques, including RNA chemical synthesis, RNA secondary structure probing, biochemical fractionation, and immune cell culture. This project is a collaboration with the lab of Wenwen Fang (https://www.fang-lab.org).