Why mRNA is important for U.S. national security

Hopkins mRNA researcher explains the essential role of mRNA medicines in military readiness and national defense

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA technology saved lives by shortening vaccine development from several years to a matter of months. Unlocking the capabilities of mRNA, or messenger RNA, has since brought forth exciting new developments in biotechnology—including potential applications in national security.

As artificial intelligence advances and adversaries invest heavily in building their capabilities, the United States faces a new range of potential threats involving biotechnology. This has caught the attention of Congress, which established the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) to explore strategies to advance U.S. biotech development to “address the national security and defense needs” of the country. Yet despite its promise, mRNA technology faces major roadblocks in the U.S. today. Most recently, the Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s application for a new mRNA flu vaccine then reversed its decision a week later.

Jeff Coller, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University and director of the RNA Innovation Center, has spent over three decades studying how cells regulate gene expression through mRNA. As co-founder of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines and the biotechnology company Tevard Biosciences, he bridges basic science and therapeutic development. In this Q&A, he explores how mRNA technology has become critical to national security, military readiness, and America’s competitive position in biotechnology.

Can you start by speaking more broadly about how health and national security are connected?

There are three ways we think about health and national security. One is being able to respond to a health threat, which you could generalize under “pandemic preparedness.” This is having technology that can protect the American people from naturally occurring threats—like a pathogen or COVID-19—or technologies that can protect from an engineered pathogen, a bioweapon. Many nation-states have active programs to design bioweapons that could be unleashed on large populations. 
And that, of course, is a national security issue. You need to have technologies that can address natural pathogens, but also technologies that could be engineered against artificial ones.

The second way we can think about health and national security is from a Defense Department standpoint. If we have state organizations like Russia or China that are developing bioweapons, they’re most likely going to target troops on the front line. These kinds of bioweapons can neutralize the military as effectively as a kinetic weapon, and in many ways, even more insidiously, because engineered pathogens can amplify and spread through troops. So having the capacity to defend our military, to have countermeasures that deter the use of that type of technology, is really critical.

And then the third way health is important to national security is to address threats of bioterrorism. Today, it is theoretically easy for a person who’s relatively educated in basic molecular biology and has access to simple AI tools to generate a pathogen that could infect human beings and use that in nefarious ways.

How have the threats on this front changed over the past five or 10 years? In other words, what makes these issues and this technology particularly important today?

We’ve always been burdened by pandemics, and we’ll always be challenged by naturally emerging threats. But what makes this particular moment in human history have such an acute need for technologies like mRNA is really the emergence of easy access to molecular biology technologies as well as artificial intelligence.

A normal pathogen has usually evolved for hundreds of thousands of years before it’s able to infect a human. But AI can be used to evolve viruses, as recently demonstrated by researchers at the Arc Institute who created the first AI-designed viruses using a model trained on millions of bacteriophage sequences. They evolved about 300 viruses that Mother Nature has never seen, and 16 of those performed better than anything that has evolved naturally.

So with AI, humans can now generate artificial viruses that work better than natural ones. A bad actor could easily evolve a human pathogen within a matter of hours using an AI algorithm and then have the capacity to weaponize that. Not only that, but with an AI-generated viral algorithm, you may be able to create a virus that’s highly contagious and 100% lethal. We don’t generally see this in Mother Nature, because a virus that is 100% lethal would extinguish itself almost immediately. It wouldn’t have time to evolve before it kills all its hosts.

So the only way to quickly respond to an artificially created virus is to have a technology that’s equally adaptable—and that’s mRNA. There’s just no other choice.

What do you see as the biggest national security risk of reducing investment in mRNA research?

The biggest risk is that we’re going to erode the infrastructure that we created in 2019 and 2020 for the deployment of this technology to literally billions of people around the world. It’s not just reducing investment. The political winds are signaling that this is a technology you better not work on because you won’t be appreciated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. If you try to get funding, it isn’t going to come. If you try to build infrastructure in the United States, we won’t support it.

And this is trickling down into the venture capital community. They’re not going to invest in the technology because they see no return on investment within the United States. This demonization of the technology has huge implications, because it’s stripping away our ability to even think about preserving this capacity that is truly an American-made invention, this capacity that we have to protect American citizens as well as our troops.

“If you want to make America first, you’ve got to make America first. Don’t make America the buyer; make it the seller of these types of technologies, the developer of these technologies.”

– Jeff Coller, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University

You mentioned the economic effects. How does mRNA technology impact the U.S. economic security?

Of course, there’s an industry around this that is revolutionizing healthcare, so there are manufacturing jobs and scientific jobs. Plus, National Institutes of Health dollars invested in research have always produced a return on investment. The NIH stated that in fiscal year 2023, every $1 of NIH funding generated about $2.46 of economic activity. 
So there’s that simple calculus.

But probably the more important calculus is what we saw evident during the pandemic. For every day that a country is shut down, as happened during COVID-19, we’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. People can’t go to work, they can’t get paid, supply lines are disrupted, the food chain is disrupted. Pandemics are debilitating, not just from a health standpoint, but from shutting down a system that moves so effortlessly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The faster you can put that system back in action, the faster you recover. And if we were to go back and start developing vaccines the old-fashioned way, the timelines are between five and 10 years for the average development of a vaccine. If we didn’t have mRNA technology, a COVID vaccine would just be coming on the market now in 2026. Think about that: Six years of economic destruction.

Do you see mRNA as a space race or an AI race for biotech? What’s the cost of losing the race?

If you think about the infrastructure behind mRNA technology, it’s an American innovation success story that rivals the moonshot. Actually, it surpasses it. We invented the sequencing technology. We invented the internet where that data lives. American scientists accessed it in 24 hours. The computing power alone exceeded the space race. From viral sequence to vaccine design in 48 hours. Clinical trials completed in months, not the usual decade. First doses in arms within a year. Then we scaled it: billions of doses manufactured and distributed worldwide. That’s not just science. That’s American industrial might. And the coordination? Academia, industry, and government moving in lockstep. That’s what happens when America decides to win. This is an Apollo mission-level achievement. We should be celebrating it like one.

The real risk of ceding our leadership in this field is that our adversaries or other countries will develop the technology faster than we will. Forty-six percent of all mRNA vaccines in clinical development are from China now, and the amount of money that they’re putting into the mRNA platform is enormous. What are they seeing that we’re not?
They’re seeing a highly adaptable technology that’s not only really good for medicine, but also really good for defense.

At the end of the day, if we have the next pandemic, do we have to beg China for the antidote? 
What if they don’t want to give it to us? And if we don’t have the ability to respond at the level that other countries can, we lose on every measure that matters—economically, in lives, in competitive advantage, and in global leadership. Those are the things that I know resonate with policymakers. If you want to make America first, you’ve got to make America first. Don’t make America the buyer; make it the seller of these types of technologies, the developer of these technologies.