DCAT Week 2025: Enzymatic RNA Synthesis

Understanding the critical quality attributes of a whole cell is challenging, remarks Alison Moore, chief technical officer, Codexis, and companies are working on manipulating transcription or translation more directly. PharmTech Group spoke with Moore ahead of Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association Week (DCAT Week) 2025 to find out the latest about the RNA therapy market and to get perspective on how enzymatic RNA synthesis is used to synthesize RNA molecules.

“What we've seen is amazing strides by amazing companies in gene therapy,” says Moore. “For example, I think manipulations directly of DNA, where necessary, you know, can create curative outcomes, whether those will be really large, ever really large population size medicines, perhaps not. And that brings me to the RNA space, where manipulating RNA and just the beauty of having very specific transcriptional or translational control is really a lovely concept that is being worked on so actively across many companies, then double clicking a little more into RNA in general. So obviously, the public has seen the utility of mRNA in vaccine development, which remains revolutionary, and we'll see where that goes in the future.”

DCAT Week is happening March 17–20, 2025 in New York City.

Click the video above to watch the full interview.