Pulling mRNA Research Funding Undermines Future Innovations
by Wayne Winegarden | August 15, 2025
The U.S. is a global leader in the innovative pharmaceutical industry, in part, because the public and private sectors effectively fulfill their complimentary roles. The federal government funds basic research that expands our knowledge base; the private sector leverages this basic research to develop efficacious and safe medications.
This beneficial process is fostering what Stanford Medicine calls “a biomedical revolution” that has resulted “in an explosion of knowledge about life and how it works” that offer “up possibilities that were unimaginable just a few years ago… that will allow us to not only heal disease, but to predict and prevent it.”
Too often, the valuable roles both the public and private sectors play are misunderstood. Typically, the detractors wholly undervalue the role of the private pharmaceutical industry, claiming that it is the federal government that develops treatments. This is simply untrue. The private pharmaceutical industry investedmore than $104 billion into research and development projects in 2024 alone. For comparison, the entire National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget is around $48 billion.
More important, the comparative advantage of the private sector differs from the public sector. Private sector firms can develop, test, and commercialize new innovative treatments much more efficiently than the government. Without these efforts and the hundreds of billions of dollars in private capital, the biomedical revolution would have fizzled out years ago.
What has also been essential is the government’s efforts to expand knowledge by supporting basic scientific inquiry. Current NIH study topics include examining how artificial intelligence can be adopted to biomedical research, evaluating genome editing technologies, and researching messenger RNA (mRNA) topics.
Undermining this role, the Department of Health and Human Services pulled the funding for the mRNA projects in early August. Defunding the mRNA projects jeopardizes research that is showing great potential to help patients.
Most people never heard of mRNA technologies until Covid-19 hit. However, this technology was not invented in response to the pandemic – private firms were able to develop efficacious Covid-19 vaccines relatively quickly because scientists had been researching mRNA technologies, partly funded by the U.S. government, since 1985.
In other words, mRNA vaccines were not a novel technology that was quickly rolled out in response to the pandemic. They were the culmination of decades of basic scientific research. Going forward, the technology has the potential to be transformational.
mRNA therapies help cells produce the relevant antibodies or antigens enabling the body to fight the targeted disease – whether it’s a virus or cancers. The promise of this therapy for pancreatic cancer patients exemplifies the exciting potential benefits.
Pancreatic cancer is currently one of the “five most lethal cancers” with a 5-year relative survival rate of merely 13%. The results of a personalized mRNA therapy currently in a phase I trial is showing the potential to significantly extend the longevity and quality of life for pancreatic cancer patients.
mRNA treatments are also showing promise for treating other cancers including melanoma, lung cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. Those who are against mRNA technology are killing one of our best shots at a cure for cancer – a diagnosis that everyone fears and all want a cure.
But it is not only treatments for cancer that are being obstructed. mRNA technology is showing promise as an efficacious treatment for infectious diseases, genetic disorders, and auto immune diseases.
Healthcare is complex. It involves trade-offs and should always be patient driven, a criterion our healthcare system too often fails. However, one major achievement of the U.S. healthcare system has been the development of innovative treatments – 720 innovative drugs were approved by the FDA between 2000 and 2022.
The introduction of so many treatments has significantly improved our health outcomes. For instance, a Health Affairs study found that 35 percent of the increase in U.S. life expectancy between 1990 and 2015 was due to pharmaceutical innovation.
By arbitrarily cancelling the mRNA research programs, the federal government is risking future innovations in a research area demonstrating great promise. The implications for future increases in our health and wellbeing are dire.
