![Pictures At An [mRNA]Exhibition What We Can Learn From Picasso (Pt 1)](https://vertassets.blob.core.windows.net/sites/logos/rna.png)
Pictures At An [mRNA]Exhibition: What We Can Learn From Picasso (Pt. 1)
By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA
I’ve never been shy about the fact that I do not come from a scientific background. In fact, if you’ve interacted with me at all in person, you’re likely to know that, once upon a time, I made the (extremely rational) decision to pursue my love of poetry, majoring in creative writing and earning a Master of Fine Arts degree.
But what many of you may not actually know is that this choice came at the expense of pursuing a different (equally lucrative) career path: Becoming an art historian. Fast forward 15-ish years and the launch of several pharma-centric websites later, I am not an art historian; but I’ve managed to keep the visual arts alive in my life and, for better or worse, in yours, as well.
Case in point: A few weeks ago, I was given the honor of kicking off the inaugural CASSS mRNA Symposium with a presentation on the current and future shapes of the mRNA industry. As I sat down to plan for this presentation, I found myself thinking about an exhibition of Picasso’s sketches at the Cleveland Art Museum I’d seen a few months prior. Though we often associate Picasso first and foremost with the Avant Gaarde/Cubism style, I was struck by just how stylistically diverse his body of work was — a claim we can also make for our mRNA/RNA molecules and their ability to be used in a variety of different therapeutic approaches.
In my presentation, I argued that there are three lessons we can learn from Picasso that will also help our own industry mature. In the upcoming weeks, I plan to unpack these lessons, highlighting specific instances in which I see our industry taking these lessons to heart and making progress — starting here with lesson 1:
Being Innovative Comes After We Master The Basics
It’s easy to assume that Picasso was born with a paintbrush in his hand and the capacity to create some whacky art straight out of the womb. But as much of his earlier (non-cubist) work demonstrated, he spent decades of his career mastering “the basics” of anatomy, perspective, and proportion before throwing it all to the wind.
Over the past few years, I’ve witnessed our industry working to “master the basics” in several critical ways. However, for the sake of brevity, I’m only going to isolate two big steps we’ve been taking here:
We’ve been working tirelessly to let the science catch up and to define our drug substance and drug product quality.
Below, I turn each of these steps into their own individual exhibits, isolating a few specific “works” (a.k.a. industry examples) that I think best showcase our progress toward better understanding the science behind and the quality of our RNA products.
Exhibit A: “Letting The Science Catch Up” (Assorted works)
Yuki Kayaga, et.al.
Purdue University, Indiana, USA
NuFold, 2025
Ink on Paper in Nature Communications
Arguably one of the greatest works to hit the mRNA gallery this year, the open access publication of this critical text meets a long-standing industry need: To better understand the tertiary structure of RNA. As previous scholarship has emphasized, the RNA space has long suffered from limited structural information. Taking its inspiration from the “deep learning” movement that bred such works as AlphaFold for the prediction of protein structure, NuFold relies upon AlphaFold’s network architecture to depict the relationship between nucleic acid sequence and structure. Just as our molecules demand a closer look, be sure to feast your eyes on this groundbreaking work of digital and biological prowess.
Johns Hopkins University & TriLink
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
RNA Innovation Center, 2024
Work of Architecture
All great artists take risks — or so the saying goes. Such risk can be clearly demonstrated in the realms of academia, with this newly opened Innovation Center being a prime example of the infrastructure that can — and needs to be — in place to ensure the industry can advance next-generation RNA products. The launch of this center in 2024 was part of a sweeping movement across the academic ecosystem. The JHU center opened alongside other contemporaries, including RNA research centers at UVA, University of Rochester/University of Albany, and Macquarie University (Australia), to name a few. Such works serve as further inspiration for and/or compliment the ongoing proliferation of academic scholarship boasting tools and strategies for improving product knowledge, manufacturing, and COGS.
Artist Consortium
The Entire World, Earth
Assorted Clinical Data, 2024-25
Mixed Media
If you look closely at this [in-progress] mosaic, you’ll note that it’s impossible to single out just one artist [company] and/or artistic style [RNA molecule]; this has been and continues to be a collaborative effort between sponsors, patients, caregivers, investigators, providers, and sites of care. If we single out the progress that has been made over the past six months to a year, we’re finally getting more color on the impact of mRNA/RNA structure on clinical function. While, at surface level, this mosaic may seem nothing more than a collection of colorful lines of different lengths and color patterns, it is actually a reflection of the progress made in the linear mRNA and saRNA spaces by the likes of Nutcracker Therapeutics, Editas, Verve, Beam, Tessera, BioNTech, Moderna, Intellia, CytomX, Replicate Biosciences, Arcturus, and Strand Therapeutics. We’re also starting to see some circular shapes emerging within this striated tableau, thanks to the work of Orna, Sail, and Circio.
Exhibit B: Defining Drug Substance & Drug Product Quality (Assorted Works)
U.S. Pharmacopoeia & European Pharmacopoeia
N. Bethesda, Maryland, USA; & Strasbourg, France, EU
USP Analytical Procedures for Quality of mRNA Vaccines & Therapeutics, 2024
Pen & Ink on parchment
mRNA Vaccines for Human Use, 2025
Pen & Ink on parchment
mRNA Substances for the Production of mRNA Vaccines for Human Use, 2025
Pen & Ink on parchment
DNA Templates for the Preparation of mRNA Substances, 2025
Graphite on parchment
Created prior to the emergence of official regulatory guidance, this groundbreaking series of four works goes down in history as a testament to the industry’s ability to align around the methods for analysis of our mRNA drug substances & drug products. Though each of these four works is exquisitely detailed, if we draw our attention to the final portrait in the mix on DNA templates, we can certainly notice a marked stylistic shift. While much ink has been (artistically!) spattered and spilled on the topic of drug substance and drug product quality analysis, the fact that the work on the plasmid remains in graphite suggests our knowledge on this subject remains in flux and has yet to have its details rendered permanently in ink. In fact, this interconnected series of works, starting with pen and fading away into pencil, indicates our need to lavish much more attention on the figure of the plasmid in the future.
European Medicines Agency; & MHRA
Amsterdam, Netherlands, EU; & London, UK
Draft Guidance on Individualized mRNA Cancer Immunotherapies, 2025
Blood, Sweat, & Tears on Printer Paper
Guideline on the Quality Aspects of mRNA Vaccines, 2025
Blood, Sweat, & Tears on Printer Paper
Upon first glance, these two concise, revolutionary works — albeit different in scope — seem first and foremost a clear reflection of the past learnings and progress we’ve made as an industry. However, the best artwork will not just speak to the past but also carry some relevance to the present and future — and these documents are no exception. Beneath their clear and concise exteriors are subtle undertones of future change. For example, a close reading of the first few finely crafted pages of the Draft Guidance on Individualized mRNA Cancer Immunotherapies comprise language indicating the growth yet to be had with alternative delivery systems and synthetic DNA. Such subtle inclusions remind us of all the growth we have yet to undertake as an industry, and the ongoing revisions/restoration/modernization these first-of-their-kind works may stand to undergo in the near future.