Nobel laureate Tom Cech will address political leaders, CEOs and tech pioneers from around the globe at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland this week. His message: RNA research is critical for human health and good for the global economy.

“The potential of RNA therapeutics right now is phenomenal,” said Cech, a distinguished professor of biochemistry at CU Boulder who won the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his RNA research. “But unfortunately, we are living at a time when RNA has become politicized.”

Tom Cech on the CU Boulder campus.

Cech will join RNA researcher and 2024 Nobel Prize winner Victor Ambros for a Wednesday morning talk titled “RNA: Why it is still a big deal.” He’ll also participate in a luncheon titled “Stories of Courage and Discovery.”

His visit comes as misinformation about the molecule abounds on social media, and public funding for some RNA-related research is under threat. In August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human services moved to cancel nearly $500 million in contracts that funded mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccine development.

This week’s WEF meeting is expected to draw 3,000 leaders from 130 countries, including 400 top political leaders—President Donald Trump among them—and 850 top CEOs.

Cech said he hopes his visit can help shed light on the rich history and great promise of the long-overlooked molecule that has inspired 11 Nobel prizes and nearly 400 new drugs.

“This is not a new-fangled invention to be frightened of,” said Cech. “These are proven technologies built through science over the course of six decades, and they have the potential to save millions of lives.”

A national leader

In December, the analytics platform ScholarGPS ranked Cech No. 1 in the world for lifetime RNA research and CU Boulder as No. 1 in the study of ribosomal RNA. Fourteen of the top 100 RNA researchers listed are either at CU or trained at CU and are now professors elsewhere.

“Our No. 1 ranking is a reflection of all the talented students and post docs who have come through here,” said Cech.

Since its discovery in 1953, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) has become a household word. But many people would be hard-pressed to identify what RNA stands for (ribonucleic acid).

“DNA has been in the spotlight and RNA has been in the shadows,” Cech said.

RNA is, essentially, a copy of one of the two strands in DNA. For years, it was viewed as a messenger, ferrying genetic instructions from DNA to tell the cell to make certain proteins.

Cech’s Nobel-winning discovery revealed that RNA could also be a catalyst on its own, igniting chemical reactions necessary for life to exist.

“It was one of the moments in science when people woke up to thinking they had underestimated RNA, and they should keep their eyes open for new things it could do,” he said.

New therapies for rare diseases

Since then, RNA research has spawned a host of medical breakthroughs.

In 2020, University of California Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who completed her postdoctoral training in Cech’s lab, won the Nobel Prize for developing CRISPR. The gene-editing tool uses RNA to guide “molecular scissors” to specific positions on the genome to make cuts. The discovery is already leading to new therapies for genetic diseases, including an FDA-approved treatment for sickle cell disease.

Ambros won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for discovering “micro-RNAs,” which can work like a dimmer switch to turn genes up and down. In all, about 500 microRNAs have been identified in people, with some implicated in cancer, congenital hearing loss, and eye and skeletal disorders. Tens of thousands of patients, including children with rare diseases, are already being treated with therapies related to micro-RNAs.

By far the most well-known, and controversial, application of RNA research has been for vaccine development.

In 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s new COVID-19 vaccine, which uses messenger RNA to instruct the body to make the COVID “spike protein,” inducing an immune response.

By some estimates, these vaccines saved nearly 20 million lives in the first year of their use.

Because RNA-based therapies are easy to repurpose to prevent or treat different diseases, Cech believes the new frontier of RNA-based therapies has only just begun.

But he acknowledges that confusion abounds among non-scientists.

Contrary to popular belief, he says, mRNA-based vaccines cannot “change people’s genes,” and they are not based on new science. 

As he heads to the world’s most famous economic forum, Cech stresses another benefit of funding a broad array of RNA research.

“The cost to society, of dealing with extremely ill children and adults, is a huge burden. If we can diagnose and treat disease more effectively, we will not only aid human happiness, but we will also have a huge economic impact.”