Eric Lam

The Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations program has awarded Eric Lam a $100,000 Phase I grant. The Foundation has committed $100 million to encourage scientists worldwide to expand the pipeline of ideas to fight our greatest health challenges.

With the prevalence in the developing world of virus-based diseases – such as hepatitis C; influenza (swine flu, avian flu and others); and HIV/AIDS – the creation and deployment of vaccines and novel RNA-based therapeutics face enormous obstacles, both technical and economic.

With viruses’ propensity to change and evade drugs, traditional therapies and preventive measures have proven ineffective in the long term. Responding to this challenge, Lam is concentrating on the use of combinatorial RNA interference (RNAi) to circumvent virus evasiveness. Its use is currently revolutionizing science and medicine alike.

Instead of focusing on a single target in a virus, combinatorial RNAi can deliver a “one, two combination punch.” Combinatorial RNAi molecules can inhibit a virus’s lifecycle by targeting multiple genes. Thus, if one gene mutates to evade a drug, an RNA molecule can go after one or more alternative genes essential to the virus’s replication processes.

A more critical obstacle to these types of RNA therapeutics vaccination may be the economics of delivering it to the people who need it. Lam has engineered tomato lines into which designer genes have been introduced, encoding the desired RNAs targeting essential components of viruses.

Simply growing and eating the tomato may be a way of producing and delivering the RNA therapeutics to economically challenged or remote communities. The Gates Foundation grant will enable Lam to pursue this line of research further.