Jacob Kimmel

They also don't go everywhere.

It's not that we have examples of like a single viral species that infects every cell type in the body and we just need to engineer it to make it safe.

We would have to also –

engineer the virus to go to new cell types.

So there's some limitations there.

LNPs likewise have some problems.

They can go to tons of cell types.

That's what largely we're working on.

We're super excited about it.

But there are some physical constraints.

They just have a certain size, and they have to get from your bloodstream, out of your bloodstream, toward a given target cell, and they have to not fuse into any of the other cells along the way.

So there's a whole gamut they have to run.

Ultimately, I think we're probably going to have to solve delivery the way that our own genome solved delivery.

So we have this same problem that arose during evolution, which is how do I patrol the body, find arbitrary signals in the environment, and then deliver some important cargo there when some set of events happens?

How do I find a specific place and only near those cell types release my cargo?

And really, the problem was solved by the immune system.

So we have cell types in our body, T cells and B cells, which are effectively engineered by evolution to run around, invaginate whatever tissues they need to.

They can climb almost anywhere in the bodies.

There's nowhere they can't get access almost.

And then once they sense a particular set of signals, and they've got a very ornate circuitry to do this, they run basically an AND gate logic, they can release a dis-specified payload.