The mRNA technology that allowed rapid development of vaccines for Covid-19 could one day lead to the development of vaccines for cancer, according to researchers.

The Atlanta Jewish Times explored the possibilities and turned to Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering Regents Professor Mark Borodovsky to explain how the technology works:

Borodovsky, who first came to Atlanta in the first wave of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union in 1990, has been at the forefront of this rapidly developing frontier of modern medicine.

As the founder and director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech, he has been instrumental in developing new ways of sequencing the genome, the key to the foundational building blocks of all human life.

His work has been supported by The Marcus Foundation, funded by the cofounder of Home Depot Bernie Marcus.

In 2006, Marcus gave the university $15 million to build a research center to explore what are called nano particles, the small building blocks of all matter. He also established the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing to develop new medical initiatives in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

According to Dr. Borodovsky, recent medical advances and the COVID vaccines are simply technology urged on by the world’s medical needs, catching up with basic science.

“It can take 30 years to come up with a concept and get this concept up to realization in a technological sense. So now we talk about several months.”

Read the full story in the Atlanta Jewish Times.