Ongoing federal budget cuts stifle researchers' efforts to follow creative ideas that can lead to medical breakthroughs, wrote Jeff Coller, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of RNA Biology and Therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, in an op-ed published June 20 in The New York Times.
A small study of Gila monster venom by the Department of Veterans Affairs led to the creation of blockbuster GLP-1 drugs. "Bacteria defending themselves in a vat of yogurt" led to the lifesaving CRISPR gene-editing tool. Soil from Easter Island led to a drug that prevents organ transplant rejections. These and other findings—including Coller's mRNA research used in COVID-19 vaccines—were made possible by supporting American researchers with the resources and time required to pursue the seemingly weird science behind profound discoveries, Coller wrote.
"Less support for scientists means strange questions no one will get to chase," wrote Coller, inaugural director of the university's RNA Innovation Center. "Exploring those questions is how medicine advances."
"I have watched a long-shot question turn into medicine," Coller wrote. "For years my lab has worked on how the body destroys its own messenger RNA, the molecule that carries our genetic instructions. No one could have justified the research by what it might cure. Then mRNA became the basis of some COVID vaccines, and that obscure problem turned out to matter, because making the vaccine work means keeping that fragile molecule from being destroyed too fast."
"Right now, in some underfunded lab, a scientist is chasing a question that sounds pointless, and a team somewhere else is a decade into a problem that may take another decade to crack. No one can say if they will succeed. But a century of experience says that funding people to do this work is a good bet. If we stop making that bet, we will pay for it in cures no one will know to miss."
