Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

A New Paradigm of Medicine is Here #science #tech #biotech #medicine

7 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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1:29

In this segment of the video "A New Paradigm of Medicine is Here," Jake Becraft, co‑founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics, explains how his company has been developing mRNA technology since its founding in 2017, well before the broader public awareness sparked by the COVID‑19 pandemic. He describes mRNA as a versatile platform that delivers instructions to cells to produce specific proteins, positioning it as the future infrastructure for faster, more precise medicines. The narrative references Moderna’s early work and the near‑95% efficacy of its COVID‑19 vaccine, illustrating how the pandemic validated mRNA’s potential. Becraft emphasizes Strand’s goal to create tumor‑targeted therapies that deliver proteins directly to cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue, illustrating a vision of highly precise, personalized treatments that could dramatically accelerate drug development.

Chapters

It was probably unlikely they were going to make it to Christmas. And instead, at Christmas last year, they had no detectable tumors.
This is Jake Becraft, the co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics.
My LinkedIn, the first thing that it says is making medicine move faster. I really view mRNA as the future infrastructure of medicine, and that's what we're building.
Founded in 2017, Strand was working on mRNA technology before the world knew it was a thing.
I moved to Boston to do my PhD starting in 2013. My PhD lab that I joined, 6 floors up, there was this startup that had just come out of stealth. They were called Moderna.
There is more hope on the way in the nation's fight against COVID-19.
Massachusetts-based drugmaker Moderna announcing its vaccine is nearly 95% effective.
They were doing mRNA technology, and we thought mRNA is this incredibly promising tech. It essentially is a very fancy way to deliver proteins into a cell.
The M in mRNA stands for messenger. This is because mRNA delivers instructions to your cells, telling them what proteins to make. Beechcraft and his co-founders have long thought that they could use mRNA to create very precise medicines. If, for example, you have a cancerous tumor, they want to make a therapy that goes straight for the tumor and leaves the rest of your body alone.