Jacob Kimmel

So one type of virus people use a lot is called an AAV.

Those AAVs carry DNA genomes, and so you can get genes, whole genes into cells.

They've got some packaging sizes.

You can think of it kind of like a very small delivery truck, so you can't put everything you want into it.

They can go to certain cell types as well.

And then on top of just where do you actually get the nucleic acid to begin with, you can engineer the sequences a bit.

And that basically allows you to add like a knot gate on it.

You can make it turn off the nucleic acid in certain cell types, but you're never going to use the sequence engineering to get nucleic acid into cells where it didn't get delivered in the first place.

So you can sort of start broad with your delivery vector and then use sequence to narrow down to make it more specific, but not the other way around.

So I think both of those methods are super promising.

Again, if nothing else emerged for decades, we'd still have tons and tons of problems as a therapeutic development community to solve even using just those.

I do think I have one sort of very controversial opinion, which, you know, people can roast me for later.

You have just one?

I have many controversial opinions.

One of them is that I think both of these probably in the limit will not be the way that we're delivering medicines in the year 2100.

If you think about viral vectors, no matter what, they're always going to be some amount of immunogenic.

You're always going to have your immune system trying to fight them off.

You can play tricks.

You can try and cloak them, et cetera, et cetera.

But they're always going to have some toxicity risk.