William Murphy is a biomedical engineerwho studies the ways medicine can mimic nature. A 1998 graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University, Murphy is the keynote speaker at the university’s Founder’s Day Convocation on Wednesday.
In his address, Murphy will discuss research that encompasses a broad range of subjects, from bone regeneration and vaccines, to something a bit more unexpected: meat.
Scientists have been experimenting with laboratory-grown meat for years. Otherwise known as cultured meat or cellular agriculture, it’s animal protein created through techniques similar to those used in regenerative medicine. Murphy said using cells derived from animals to produce meat in a lab opens the door to all kinds of possibilities.
“The exciting prospect here is that there's the potential to be able to combine natural sources, both the cells that come from animals, as well as the scaffolds on which they grow, to develop new kinds of food, and to be able to really control the properties of the food,” he said.
Murphy said with emerging technologies, it may be possible to develop a wide range of meat from beef, poultry and fish that can be produced in large quantities. Researchers are developing ways to control for taste and texture in an effort to make the product appealing for mass consumption. The problem now, Murphy says, is that the process is still too expensive to for the products to become mainstream.
“But there's at least the potential to drop those costs using new technologies,” he said.
Misunderstanding messenger RNA
Murphy also researches messenger RNA delivery systems, or mRNA. It’s something that’s been in the news a lot lately, due to its association with the COVID-19 vaccine. But Murphy said there are still a lot of misperceptions about how the technology works, primarily because of misinformation that proliferates online.
“One of the things that probably gets misunderstood the most about messenger RNA based technology is that it really is a temporary effect,” Murphy said. “So, it's not like some other types of gene therapy, that that can potentially be long lasting, or have durable effects over a very long period of time. What essentially happens when you deliver an mRNA strand is that the cell that takes up the mRNA, produces the protein that's encoded by the mRNA, for a very short period of time — typically on the order of hours today to a few days — and then that mRNA is degraded.”
Once the mRNA is degraded, it’s essentially traceless, Murphy said. It leaves no evidence that it was present.
“In the case of the vaccine technology, that short term effect is enough to activate the immune system and train the immune system to respond to the virus, which is exactly what one needs,” he explained.
The challenge that exists for researchers, Murphy said, is how to get mRNA to spend more time in the body. Much of Murphy’s own work centers around using tissue regeneration to treat conditions like spinal cord injuries or even cancer. That requires figuring out how to stimulate a long-term process by delivering a very short-lived effect.
“So, it's interesting, you know, oftentimes people worry about the long-term effects and this mRNA is going to be in me and it's going to be in my family for generations to come,” Murphy said, of unfounded concerns that the COVID vaccine will cause genetic mutations.
“There really isn't a common mechanism for that,” Murphy said. “The mRNA is degraded and removed from the system in a really short period of time.”
