The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 discusses the rapid development of RNA technologies and their impact on global health innovation.
At Davos, Nature editor-in-chief Magdalena Skipper reframed RNA’s journey from “a really boring molecule” to a central platform for modern medicine. Nobel laureate Tom Cech traced how decades-old understanding of the genetic code enabled rapid COVID-19 vaccine design: mRNA in lipid nanoparticles instructs cells to make spike protein, training immunity and saving an estimated “10 to 20 million lives” in the first year. He argued mRNA’s speed and flexibility could transform flu vaccination and power personalized cancer vaccines.
Cech then described a foundational surprise from basic research in pond organism Tetrahymena: RNA can catalyze reactions on its own, supporting the idea that early life may have relied on an “RNA world.” Nobel laureate Victor Ambros extended RNA’s role from messenger to regulator, explaining microRNAs and siRNAs as programmable guides that silence genes by sequence matching—making RNA both “a target and a tool.”
The speakers emphasized programmability: once delivery and safety are solved, retargeting becomes “just a matter of knowing… AGC and U.” They also positioned RNA as a pragmatic alternative to permanent genome editing—changes aren’t “reversible” with DNA edits, while RNA is transient. Finally, they defended open data and basic science as the engine of breakthroughs, with AI accelerating discovery but requiring validation: it’s “a great hypothesis generating tool,” not “the answer.”
Good morning to all of you here in the room and all of you who are joining us online. Welcome to this session on RNA and why it still matters today. My name is Magdalena Skipper. I am editor in chief of nature. And let me start with a little bit of a personal story. When I was a student, I studied genetics. RNA was considered to be a really boring molecule. It didn't do very much. It was sort of ferrying messages between the genome and the proteome. And the proteins are the building blocks of life was fast forward several years to today, and we know RNA is a huge family of molecules, much more interesting than what I was taught as a student. And today you are in for a real treat. You will hear from two outstanding researchers who, by studying fundamental biology in model organisms, and you will hear about that in a few minutes. Discovered incredible things about properties of RNA, what these molecules can do in normal biology, but also why that knowledge can then be translated and taken into the clinic today. And of course, the two individuals I'm talking about are two professors to Nobel Prize winners. I now want to welcome to the stage, professor Tom cheek, who will start us off and will be shortly followed by Professor Victor Ambros. Please.
Thank you. Magdalena. You all know about DNA, the stuff of genes. You know that it's responsible for your inherited traits. It's also responsible for genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy. You know that you can trace your ancestry through DNA, and you can solve crimes with it. Well, after the DNA double helix was announced in 1953, discovered by Watson and Crick with help from some excellent data provided by Rosalind Franklin, the scientific community turned their attention to how that information stored in DNA was used to provide the instructions to make particular proteins. After all, proteins are responsible for our muscle movement. They're responsible for the enzymes in our stomach that are digesting the breakfast that you perhaps had this morning. So proteins are the doers and shakers and cells. DNA has the information. But just like if you have a computer hard drive that has a terabyte of information, that sounds very impressive, but you need a way to read it out, right? It's useless unless there's a readout mechanism. And the answer to that turned out to be RNA. So here's the RNA made from the DNA. And it contains the same bits of information. That's shown here is the four colors as one of the strands of DNA. The DNA has the letters of the alphabet AGC and T, and the RNA has AGC. And you, you being informationally equivalent to the T and DNA. And then groups of three of these building blocks or informational units along the RNA are used to specify a particular amino acid, and laying down those amino acids in a protein chain is what gives the protein its power. Now, all of this was known in the 1960s. It had all been solved then and reproduced over and over and over again is like a law of nature at that point. And so when the Covid 19 pandemic came along, we already knew how we could use the code in the RNA to specify a particular protein molecule. And in this case, if you want to train the immune system to be on the lookout for SARS-CoV-2, you need to express a protein that the immune system would see something on the outside of the virus. This turned out to be the spike protein. And then, by injecting the mRNA encapsulated into a little fatty globule called a lipid nanoparticle, the immune system then produces the spike protein and trains itself to be on the lookout for the for the virus. So this activity of RNA, this messenger activity is pretty cool. And it also saved like estimated 10 to 20 million lives in the first year that the vaccine was rolled out. But that's only the middle part of this story, because right now, scientists are working on an improved influenza vaccine. The current flu vaccines are made by injecting chicken eggs. Millions of chicken eggs annually is so slow to produce that it can't respond to the virus that we know is coming down the road. You have to try to anticipate that. Whereas the mRNA vaccines can be quickly made and in addition and very exciting, there are mRNA vaccines against cancer that are being, are in clinical trials right now. So, this is, I think, the future of mRNA. But nonetheless, RNA was believed to be a passive messenger. So when I moved from MIT to, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Boulder, Colorado, to start my own laboratory, I started working on pond scum. Now, why would you do this? This organism. Tetrahymena thermophila. Well, it was because I was interested in DNA. DNA was in the spotlight. It was the diva, right? RNA was lurking in the shadows, not seeming to be very important. So I wanted to work on DNA. And this particular pond animal had 10,000 copies of a particular gene. Now most of you have how many copies of each gene in a cell? Two, right. One for mom and one from dad. So 10,000 is a big deal. If you're a biochemist, you want to have a lot of material to work with. So we chose to work with this organism. And we found very early on that the sensible coding region of the DNA, this 10,000 copy gene was interrupted by a stretch of non-coding DNA called an intron. These had been discovered a couple of years earlier. Sort of like a commercial message interrupting your favorite film. You'd like to fast forward through it. The cell doesn't have a way of fast forwarding through intron, so instead it copies them along with the, useful flanking sequences. And then it has the RNA has to be spliced. It has to be cut and rejoined. So we were looking at the RNA simply because it was the product made from the DNA, which was our real interest. And we found that the RNA in the test tube was undergoing this precise rearrangement. It was cutting at two spots and gluing itself together, and there had to be some catalyst responsible for such a specific and rapid reaction. And all the textbooks said that all catalysts in biology are protein enzymes. So there had to be a protein enzyme. Yet we thought that RNA was squeaky clean. Well, maybe there was some contaminant that we didn't know about. So it took us about two years of rigorous experimentation to eliminate the possibility that there was a contaminating protein. Before we were ready to announce that the RNA was able to, by itself, do this reaction where it gets cut by the small molecule called a G, and then it opens up, and then the ends get stitched together. And this was the first example of a biological catalyst that was a form of genetic material, RNA rather than protein. And this excited the scientific community because they'd been worried about how life originated on the planet Earth 4 billion years ago. Now, if you need both an informational molecule to hand down to the next generation but informational molecule DNA just sits there. It just stores information it can't copy itself. How do you copy one DNA molecule into daughter DNA molecules? Well, you would need some kind of an enzyme. And that seemed improbable that at the same little droplet of water, at the same time, through random chemical processes, there would be formed both an informational molecule and a catalyst to copy it. Now that we knew that RNA was both an informational molecule and a biocatalyst maybe 4 billion years ago, the first primitive self-reproducing life form was RNA. And then the proteins came later. And much more recently, DNA came onto the scene because it's a more stable storehouse of genetic information. And so, that was one interest, but the other interest was just that it sort of opened up the idea that RNA could be more than just a message that all RNAs don't have to worry about the genetic code. Some of them are doing cool things in biological systems. And that brings us to Victor Ambros.
Thank you. Tom. Like Tom, my laboratory and I came to RNA accidentally. We were studying a animal, and particularly the development of of an animal called Caenorhabditis elegans. And this is a, little worm. I think you'll see it here. This is a picture of me, I guess, when I used to play in the mud with worms and. And the worm. Breeder's Gazette, by the way, was a real thing. Some of you may remember this C elegans, is about is tiny. It's about a millimeter long. We were interested in using genetics to figure out how this animal develops. How does the gene specify its development? Why the elegans? It was a so-called model experimental organism that had been adopted, actually, by Sydney Brenner, originally and used by many, many investigators to study fundamental mechanisms of, of biological processes. It's related to humans. About 600 million years ago, we had a common ancestor, and indeed nowadays in our genome, at least half of our genes are can be found in the in the genome of Caenorhabditis elegans or elegans. So it's a good model for all animals, including humans. We were studying these mutants of C elegans that had very interesting properties. One mutant is whoops, let's go back. We don't go back. One mutant. The animals were skipping larval stages so that the animal became an adult too early. Okay. And whole sections of its development are missing. The other kind of mutant, which is a mutation in another gene, Lin four. The animals would repeat larval stages so they wouldn't become adults. Actually, officially, because most of their tissue was a repetition of larval stages. So it looked like these genes must be parts of some kind of clock that the animal is using to develop. And when we identified the sequences of the DNA from these genes, we which is Gary Rifkin's lab and my lab found that they represented a new or previously unknown mode of gene regulation that involved RNA, RNA interactions. And so what we found was, my team, which was Rosalind Lee and Rhonda Feinbaum, found that the product of one of the genes was in fact not coding a protein at all, but it produced a tiny RNA. And that tiny RNA later became called a microRNA. And the microRNA has evolved to regulate other genes by base pairing. So it uses those base pairing rules of of A's to use and C's to GS, so that the microRNA recognizes the mRNA and inhibits production of protein. It's now known that this process involves central to it an Argonaute protein, and that Argonaute protein is important in chaperoning the microRNA to finding its target, and also carrying out the regulation of the mRNA. So microRNAs are made by parts of the genome and evolved by parts of the genome to regulate other parts. As soon became clear that this is not just a worm thing, microRNAs were apparently evolved in our common ancestor of most of the animals about 600 million years ago. So there's about two dozen microRNA genes in humans that can also be found in essentially all animals, including C, C elegans and the. The regulation that these microRNAs carry out is really, really, prevalent or there's a thousand microRNA genes in humans, and each of those microRNAs has at least 100 estimated targets. So this web of genetic of regulatory interactions is very potent. And microRNAs have an effect on almost all aspects of our physiology, our development, aging, and wound healing. And many microRNAs are implicated in a lot of human diseases as well. But microRNAs are not, the only so they constitute a regulatory code that's RNA, RNA interactions. Right. But they're not the only kind of small RNA in our cells that do this kind of sequence based, regulation of messenger RNAs or inhibition of messenger RNAs. An important for our discussion of therapeutics is siRNAs. Now, siRNAs are small interfering RNAs. Their name comes from this larger suite of phenomena called RNA interference that the microRNAs are part of. And in this situation, the siRNA is produced. It's a brand new RNA that the cells have never seen. It's not encoded in its genome. It comes from an invading genome. So when the cell is infected, for example, by a virus, that virus is recognized by the cell and the pieces of that RNA are now accosted by the by the Argonaute protein. And those RNA pieces, now called an siRNA small interfering RNA, are used to find the viral RNA and destroy it. So you can see now that the fact that the cells have this capacity, embedded in its argonaute proteins to take a small RNA and use that small RNA to destroy a complementary messenger RNA that has therapeutic implications because many diseases are result from a misbehavior of, let's say, one or more of our genes, often a single gene product can be identified as toxic at the root of a disease pathology. Right. And in those cases, the therapy is what's called for is to knock down or to inhibit or destroy that that protein. Right. And so siRNAs or microRNAs are a great way to do that, because you can program an siRNA or microRNA to be complementary to your desired target gene through its messenger RNA, and use that to, to as a therapy. So, RNA has now become a target and a tool. And we've now talked about two complementary therapeutic applications of RNA. Right? One is the messenger RNA therapy, where the messenger RNA is formulated in a way so that it goes into cells and now produces a desired protein, for example, a vaccine or a protein that's missing, in the context of pathology. And the siRNA is a complementary approach where if the condition is rooted in a aberrant or misbehaving protein, the siRNA is used to destroy it by destroying its mRNA. And so these kinds of therapeutic, therapeutic modalities that are sort of at the forefront of RNA therapy today have a lot of interesting implications that Tom will pick up on and complete our discussion.
So just to reiterate something that that Victor said very nicely, I think, is that the one of the take home lessons for today is that these RNA medicines are incredibly easily programmable. So when you're developing a pharmaceutical therapeutic, there are all kinds of issues of safety and efficacy and delivery and stability of the of the drug in the body that have to be solved. And normally each solving each of those is a huge multi-year, perhaps half $1 billion or $1 billion, project. Right. But with the programmability of the RNA medicines that once you've solved this problem for one drug to repurpose that RNA for a new disease indication is something that and I'm of course, oversimplifying here that a high school, any high school student can do if they know their alphabet, right. They don't even need to know the whole alphabet. They just need to know AGC and you. And they can use that to either design a messenger RNA to make a a needed protein that's missing because of a genetic, problem in a particular child or particular patient, or in the case of the siRNA, to, to knock, to inhibit or destroy a disease causing RNA. So it's just a matter of knowing the alphabet and all the rest of the drug development has, in a sense, already been done now. So one of our take home lessons is that if freed from the constraints of politics, in particular, RNA does not have a party affiliation. It is a molecule. It is a chemical entity. It it's a good thing. It's essential for all of life on Earth. It's in all the food we eat. It is safe and effective. We know how it works. If freed from political discrimination, it can move forward in a very powerful way. And Victor has one more take home lesson.
The final lesson is to draw our attention to the fact that these sort of wonders of the RNA world that we talked about with their applications came from research projects that were conceived of as basic science projects, curiosity driven. There was no objective in terms of applications, questions involved. How does this little paramecium or Paramecium, this little microbe, rearrange its RNA? And in our case, how does a worm keep track of time? And so the payoffs that come from that are often take time. But they inevitably come. And so I'm here to tell you is that the history tells us that basic science has payoffs, for human health and other benefits. But that's not just in the past. That's today and in the future. And so it's very important that we in all our communities are aware of the fact that we need to advocate for basic science research going forward, especially for these, personalized or these precision medicine modalities like RNA therapeutics, where basic science is required to really understand the fundamental fundamental mechanism of the disease so that the therapies can be applied rationally.
Thank you very much. That was please stay stay with me. We're going to have, a few minutes for for questions now. But this was a terrific, roller coaster ride through many, many years of research, of course, in your labs. But of course, labs of of many others. Thank you. A wonderful illustration of how indeed, as you say, Victor, fundamental research in labs, turned this rather mundane molecule that that I was taught about at university. I was thinking, as you were talking about it, turning it into almost like, well, a messenger, a postman delivering that information from the genome to to make the proteins into a kind of boss, executive decision maker in many, in many different, different settings. So really, really powerful examples. And as you say, all of this through fundamental discovery of that beautiful complexity that exists in our cells, not just in our cells, but cells of of all living organisms. And then, of course, that information taken forward to, to be applied, as you both indicated. But Tom, you particularly focused on. So let me start with perhaps an obvious question. You were advocating, Tom, in particular, that a high school student could design these therapeutics that are so specific, and you illustrate why that precision, exists is inherent to to the mechanism. Why is it then that we need other therapies? We talk about genetic engineering, gene therapy? Why are we not all doing RNA based therapies?
I think there certainly is a place and an excitement, about Crispr genome editing as a way of ameliorating, many genetic diseases. The one advantage of the RNA therapeutics is that it is not a permanent change in our chromosomes. It is not something that is passed down from one cell to another, which can be something that we have to worry about the safety of. Right? So the RNA, lasts for maybe a day. In some cases. It can last for months, but it's not a permanent change. And that is a safety consideration that makes many people comfortable with the RNA therapeutics.
And that's a that's a very, very important point. A point even if that gene therapy is only localized to a specific part of the body as opposed to inherit it through generations, that can still be lasting effects, which, as you say, may be avoided with the RNA.
Well, you can't reverse it. So. So if there would be an unwanted off target effect, meaning the DNA gets fixed, the gene that you're trying to fix gets fixed, but something else happens elsewhere to a look alike sort of part of a chromosome. It's not reversible. And that's a that's why we have to be super careful about the safety of these genome editing modalities before we allow them to be used in a widespread manner.
That's right. I'm going to open up for questions in case there are any from the audience. But before that I'll just ask you, Victor. So as I was listening to both of you, I thought the only reason well, one of the key reasons why we can do this, especially in the context of therapy, why a high school student could design this is, of course, because we know the genome sequence. And in a different context, we talked about the importance of, data and data sharing. Can you speak to this a little bit?
Well, by the way, data sharing is something that we learned organically as a C elegans biologist because many of the leaders in our field, really were instrumental in embedding in the culture this idea that data should be shared. And for example, John Sulston, Sir John Sulston was a very played a big role in sequencing the human genome. But before that sequence, the C elegans genome, which was the first multicellular animal to be sequenced, John Sulston insisted in the early days of the genome project, that the raw data be posted online every night for the whole world to have access to. And the idea was that he insisted on the principle that the data is everybody's and the obligation. Our obligation is then to take that data and make something useful out of it, make either insights or products eventually. And so I think that that ethic, is is here today and we benefit enormously in scientific community, in the medical community, by, by open data. And I think one of the things that's exciting about, the genome sequencing is that the cost of genome sequencing of humans has gone down, such that we can envision perhaps a time when, every child born anywhere on the planet, for example, with an undiagnosed disease, would have their genome sequenced, and that data would be somehow, protected but available for research.
Exactly. That's a really, really important point. An important sentiment. You had a question.
I did. And, my question is that my understanding of, of biologic or protein based medicines is that they're both expensive to produce and hard to prove bio similarities. You have to run expensive trials. Is there a case for using RNA or mRNA to replace the proteins as a cheaper way to inject drugs to make it more repeatable, easier to manufacture, or is that just not a plausible solution?
Great question.
Well, let me see. You're talking about biologics, for example, where the drug is a protein.
Instead of injecting the protein, injecting the RNA to have a body.
Yeah. And so there's a lot of activity to to do that. I mean, if for example, I mean, the prime examples of course, are vaccines where instead of making the protein and injecting the protein, the RNA is injected in the cells in the body, make the product. So whenever in any if we can target an mRNA to the particular cell that we want to make the protein, then the mRNA is a feasible way of doing that. And potentially cheaper, because its manufacturing is easier than manufacturing approach.
And the protein drugs only work extracellularly, right? These antibodies don't get into the cells. So the mRNA technology is a way of making a protein in a cell that has to be made inside the cell. And so that could be a whole nother universe of, of possible, opportunities there. But in general, they're both the technologies will continue to, to both be used, I think for a long time.
There are, of course, many complexities to do with protein modifications. But I think your question is very well made that in some cases it could indeed be the right way to use the body itself to manufacture the the agent to treat a disease. A question over here.
So I'm just curious, what sort of role do you see for sort of accelerating, research with machine learning and all these new AI tools? Do you see, a role that would help bridge the gap between making a fundamental science breakthrough and translation? Or do you see them having actually a role in fundamental science?
Yeah. You've come to the right place, of course, because Tom Check and Victor Ambros are experts in in artificial intelligence and AI, I. How do we see AI as coming into play here? I mean.
Yeah.
In every imaginable way.
You know, our students are all using it now and I'm, I'm developing a new graduate program, AI and biology. It was just it's being funded by a large foundation on the East coast of the United States. Because we think that we need to, to teach our students when they first come into the PhD program, not just how to do machine learning, but to be aware of the hallucinations, the need for validation, the fact that it's a great hypothesis generating tool, but it shouldn't be taken to be the answer. And if you don't believe this, my wife just asked ChatGPT to write her, bio, and it congratulated her on having won the Nobel Prize.
Well, on this note, we will bring the conversation to to a close, but I hope you've gained an insight into the wonderful world of RNA and the complexity of of our own biology and biology of all living systems, and how that fundamental knowledge can be harnessed in a therapeutic context, and for sure, AI tools and other tools yet to come will be enhancing our ability to to do this. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you.