Jacob Kimmel

And right now, the way our genome sets them up, the payload they release is largely either enzymes that will kill some cell that they're targeting or kill some pathogen or some signal flares that call in other parts of the immune system to do the same thing.

So that's super cool, but you can think about it as a modular system that evolution's already gifted us.

We've got some signal and environmental recognition systems, so we can find particular areas of the body that we want to find, and then some sort of payload delivery system.

I can deliver some arbitrary set of things.

And I imagine if we were to rip von Winkle ourselves into 2100 and wake up, the way we will be delivering these nucleic acid payloads is actually by engineering cells to do it, to perform this very ornate function.

Those cells might actually live with you.

You probably will get engrafted with them, and they might persist with you for many years.

They deliver the medicine only when the environment within your body actually dictates that you need it.

And so you actually won't be seeing a physician every time this medicine is active.

Rather, you'll have a more ornate, responsive circuit.

The other exciting thing about cells is that they're big and they have big genomes.

And so you actually have a large palette to encode complex infrastructure and complex circuitry.

So you don't need to limit yourself to like the very small RNAs you can get in that might encode a gene or two, or in our case, a few transcription factors.

You don't have to limit yourself to this tiny AAV genome that's only a few kilobases.

You've got billions of base pairs to play with in terms of encoding all your logic.

So I think that's ultimately how delivery will get solved.

We've got many, many stepping stones along the way.

But if I could, like, clone myself and work on an even riskier endeavor, that's probably what I would do.

Not literally every single cell.

I'll asterisk it there.