Screening for Enhanced RNA Vaccines with Kathrin Leppek, Gun Woo Byeon, and Hannah Wayment-Steele

When COVID-19 hit and society decided to use mRNA vaccines for the first time, many questions remained about whether RNA itself was ready for the challenge. But three scientists at Stanford University who had never worked with each other before the pandemic realized that RNA’s limitations were merely a design challenge and not an issue with the substrate itself. Through emails and zooms, Kathrin, Gun, and Hannah built a tool to massively test RNA designs. With it, they screened for RNA with better functionality, increasing the stability and expression of the protein they encode and ultimately creating a platform to improve these life-saving vaccines.