 I am, well I was, the first 3MT finalist to stand on this stage in three years. The reason we can do this again is because of a little miracle molecule called mRNA. The COVID mRNA vaccines might look like they appeared overnight, but they are actually built on years and years of scientists trying to discover every little feature of mRNAs themselves. We need to know more about mRNAs so we can do even more with it, including making cheaper vaccines more quickly. Very simply, the job of mRNA is to be a template from which our bodies make proteins, proteins through all the important work in ourselves. Let's think of this process like a car race, picture a piece of mRNA as being the racetrack, and in this case the car is a particle called a ribosome. The ribosome races across the mRNA and reads the mRNA like a sentence, turning that information into a protein after every full lap. Now you can imagine if the track is straight, then every time the race car gets to the end it has to stop and turn around. But if the track is circular, then it can go round and round really fast. So likewise, when a piece of mRNA loots back on itself, ribosomes can make proteins from them much faster. Well, that's a theory anyway, but I want to know if this is really the case. So I start with some yeast cells because they are very simplified versions of human cells. I grow them up and I add a chemical to freeze the car race process at a moment in time. Then I take a snapshot of the thousands and thousands of mRNAs in the cells and I look at their shapes. Are they linear? Are they looped? Is it a mix? This takes me ages, but spoiler, I found that it's a mix. Now we're in the process of figuring out whether the mRNAs that like to form loops also make proteins more efficiently. At this point you may be wondering why any of this matters. You may even be thinking that I'm starting to sound a little loopy myself. Why should we care? The thing is, if the looping racetrack theory is correct, then we can use this to our advantage when designing the next mRNA vaccines. If we can change the structure of the mRNA in the vaccines to form more loops and therefore make more protein from each individual mRNA, then maybe we could halve the amount of mRNA we need to make in the first place. Half the production time, half the cost, half the time spent in lockdown pretending to your boss that you're working when you're actually killed up in bed. Double the lives saved, all from tweaking the structure of a single mRNA. I might not be able to promise you these things just yet, but what I do know is that if we want to solve the big problems in the future, we have to start small now. Every bit of knowledge about mRNA could just help us avoid the next pandemic.