(REUTERS): Tesla founder Elon Musk has announced that the company is building ‘RNA microfactories’ for coronavirus vaccine developer CureVac in Germany.
Elon Musk took to Twitter and said, “In principle, I think synthetic RNA (and DNA) has amazing potential. This basically makes the solution to many diseases a software problem.”
Replying to a post, the electric carmaker’s chief executive officer wrote, “Tesla, as a side project, is building RNA microfactories for CureVac [and] possibly others.” However, Musk did not elaborate on his plans.
CureVac, a German company, has said that it is developing transportable, automated mRNA production units that it calls printers. They will be designed to be shipped to remote locations, where they can churn out its vaccine candidate and other mRNA-based therapies depending on the recipe fed into the machine.
However, for the immediate pandemic use, it has production sites with regulatory approval in Germany with a capacity to produce hundreds of millions of doses.
RNA is a type of acid that exists in all living cells, and some pharmaceutical companies like CureVac are working to create a COVID-19 vaccine using “messenger RNA,” which can be manually inserted into cells to initiate an immune response.
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