Raina Biosciences unveils breakthrough generative AI platform for mRNA therapeutics featured in Science

GEMORNA is world’s first generative AI platform purpose-built for mRNA design and optimization, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance across diverse mRNA therapeutic applications

2025-08-28

(Press-News.org) CAMBRIDGE, Mass., August 28, 2025 – Raina Biosciences Inc., (“Raina”), an mRNA technology and therapeutics company, today announced the publication of data from its generative AI platform in Science. The data supports Raina's pioneering approach to mRNA design using its GEMORNA platform to generate novel sequences with superior drug properties over existing mRNA discovery methods. Founded by a team with deep RNA therapeutics and AI expertise, the Company’s mission is to transform the mRNA-based therapeutics landscape by accelerating drug discovery timelines and opening new therapeutic areas for mRNA with best-in-class AI-designed therapeutics.

The Science article, titled, "Deep generative models design mRNA sequences with enhanced translational capacity and stability," marks a significant landmark for optimizing novel mRNAs with enhanced expression and durability to facilitate a wide range of therapeutic mRNA applications.

The article, which was published online today by the journal Science, is summarized as follows:

Raina’s GEMORNA platform designs superior linear and circular mRNA drug molecules with optimized expression levels and durability, addressing two major issues that have limited the effectiveness of mRNA-based therapeutics GEMORNA is highly differentiated from prior RNA language models developed for predictive tasks through its direct design of novel sequences from a near infinite design space GEMORNA-generated mRNAs: Elicited significantly higher immune response in mice compared to a leading commercially available mRNA vaccine sequence, potentially supporting mRNA therapeutic vaccine applications for diseases such as cancer Achieved up to a 150-fold increase in human erythropoietin (hEPO) expression compared to an optimized benchmark, potentially supporting mRNA medicines for gene therapy Demonstrated a 5-fold increase in CD19 CAR expression and a 2-fold improvement in durability compared to a patented benchmark, resulting in nearly 100% anti-tumor efficacy in primary human T cells, potentially supporting mRNA therapies for in vivo CAR-T

"Raina’s GEMORNA platform is built upon a decade of the team’s foundational work in synthetic biology and artificial intelligence," said Jicong Cao, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Raina Biosciences, and corresponding author of the Science paper. "We are excited to work with industry-leading pharma and biotech companies to expand the usage of mRNA-based therapeutics while we prepare to build an internal pipeline."

"Raina has the potential to transform mRNA therapeutics by rapidly and reliably generating novel sequences with greater performance, precision and efficacy," said Timothy Lu, M.D., Ph.D., Raina’s Chairman of the Board and former MIT faculty member. "The GEMORNA platform could be a sea change for biopharma companies pursuing mRNA-based medicines beyond traditional infectious disease vaccines ranging from neoantigen cancer vaccines, in vivo CARs, to gene editing or gene therapy applications."

The Science publication can be found here.

Based in Boston, Raina Biosciences is a spinout company from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), founded by leaders in mRNA and AI with a strong track record in the biotech industry. Jicong Cao, Ph.D. (co-founder, Chief Executive Officer) is a former mRNA researcher at MIT and co-founder of Bota Biosciences. He Zhang, Ph.D. (co-founder, Chief Technology Officer and first author of the Science paper) was previously a Senior Staff Scientist at Baidu Research. Timothy Lu, M.D., Ph.D., Raina’s co-founder and Chairman of the Board, is a serial biotech entrepreneur having co-founded a number of biotechnology and biopharmaceutical companies, and served on the MIT faculty from 2010–2022. Joel Edwards, Chief Corporate Development Officer, brings over 25 years of leadership in corporate strategy and deal-making across biotech, including his tenure as Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Ionis Pharmaceuticals. Raina is also supported by its key scientific advisor Jeff Coller, Ph.D., Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Inaugural Director of the RNA Innovation Center at Johns Hopkins University. Raina closed an angel round of $5.7 million upon company formation.

About Raina Biosciences

Raina is pioneering the world's first and leading generative AI platform for mRNA-based therapeutics. Using its proprietary platform, GEMORNA, Raina navigates new frontiers in mRNA engineering to design sequences with optimal profiles for expression, durability, and stability. Raina is partnering with leading pharma and biotech companies to create next generation and best-in-class mRNA-based therapeutics. To learn more about Raina Biosciences visit www.rainabio.com and follow us on LinkedIn.

Media Contact:
Kelli Perkins
kelli@redhousecomms.com

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Yellowstone’s free roaming bison drive grassland resilience

2025-08-28

Yellowstone’s roaming bison herds enhance nutrient cycles and boost ecosystem health at landscape scales, according to a new study. The findings, which challenge conventional grazing wisdom, suggest that restoring large-scale migrations could unlock the species’ full ecological power. Historically, North America supported tens of millions of bison whose seasonal migrations transformed the continent’s vast grassland ecosystems. Today, these once massive herds of wild, free roaming bison are no more; only about 400,000 bison remain, and almost all exist in small managed herds on private land or within parks and reserves. ...

Turbulent flow in heavily polluted Tijuana River drives regional air quality risks

2025-08-28

The Tijuana River’s polluted waters don’t just contaminate Southern California’s beaches – they also release toxic gases and aerosols that travel far beyond the riverbanks, threatening the health of nearby communities, according to a new study. The Tijuana River Valley, straddling the US-Mexico border, faces a severe and worsening pollution crisis as untreated sewage, industrial waste, and toxic runoff flow into the Pacific, causing prolonged beach closures and persistent environmental health risks. While most concern ...

Revealed: Genetic shifts that helped tame horses and made them rideable

2025-08-28

A study of ancient horse genomes reveals the genetic changes that contributed to making the animals tame, strong, and rideable by humans thousands of years ago. The domestication of horses, which occurred at least 4,500 years ago, had a transformative effect on the evolution of human society, altering mobility, farming, and warfare. Across much of the world, horses served as a primary mode of human transportation until the rise of the combustion engine in the late 19th century. However, despite ...

Mars’ mantle is a preserved relic of its ancient past, seismic data reveals

2025-08-28

Locked beneath a single-plate crust, Mars’ mantle holds a frozen record of the red planet’s primordial past, according to a new study of Martian seismic data collected by NASA’s InSight mission. The findings reveal a highly heterogenous and disordered mantle, born from ancient impacts and chaotic convection in the planet’s early history. “Whereas Earth’s early geological records remain elusive, the identification of preserved ancient mantle heterogeneity on Mars offers an unprecedented window into the geological history and ...

Variation inside and out: cell types in fruit fly metamorphosis

2025-08-28

Osaka, Japan – All living beings, big or small, are formed through the hard work of many different cells. To keep the body ready for any challenge, cells need to be dynamic. Often, this means the same types of cell – for example, red blood cells – look and function differently to one another to work together en masse. While researchers know that these varied, or micro-heterogenous, cells exist in multiple bodily systems, the benefits of being heterogenous for how systems function are not yet known. However, in a study due to be published in PLOS Computational Biology, researchers from The University of Osaka, The University of ...

Mount Sinai researchers use AI and lab tests to predict genetic disease risk

2025-08-28

New York, NY [August 28, 2025]—When genetic testing reveals a rare DNA mutation, doctors and patients are frequently left in the dark about what it actually means. Now, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have developed a powerful new way to determine whether a patient with a mutation is likely to actually develop disease, a concept known in genetics as penetrance. The team set out to solve this problem using artificial intelligence (AI) and routine lab tests like cholesterol, blood counts, and kidney function. Details of the findings were reported ...

When bison are room to roam, they reawaken the Yellowstone ecosystem

2025-08-28

On Aug. 28, scientists from Washington and Lee University, the National Park Service and the University of Wyoming published research in Science magazine shedding new light on the value of bison recovery efforts in Yellowstone National Park. Bill Hamilton, John T. Perry Jr. Professor in Research Science at Washington and Lee University, and Chris Geremia, a researcher with the National Park Service at Yellowstone, served as co-first authors, with co-author Jerod Merkle, associate professor and Knobloch Professor in Migration Ecology and Conservation at the University of Wyoming. While momentum is building to restore bison ...

Mars’s interior more like Rocky Road than Millionaire’s Shortbread, scientists find

2025-08-28

Mars’s interior more like Rocky Road than Millionaire’s Shortbread, scientists find New research published in the journal Science reveals the Red Planet’s mantle preserves a record of its violent beginnings. The inside of Mars isn’t smooth and uniform like familiar textbook illustrations. Instead, new research reveals it’s chunky - more like a Rocky Road brownie than a neat slice of Millionaire’s Shortbread. We often picture rocky planets like Earth and Mars as having smooth, layered interiors - with crust, mantle, and core stacked like the biscuit base, caramel middle, and chocolate topping of a millionaire’s shortbread. But the ...

Tijuana River’s toxic water pollutes the air

2025-08-28

For decades, the Tijuana River has carried millions of gallons of untreated sewage and industrial waste across the U.S.-Mexico border. The river passes through San Diego’s South Bay region before emptying into the ocean, recently leading to more than 1,300 consecutive days of beach closures and water quality concerns. Residents of South Bay communities have long voiced concerns about the foul smells emanating from the river, reporting health issues including eye, nose and throat irritation, respiratory issues, fatigue ...

Penn engineers send quantum signals with standard internet protocol

2025-08-28

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania brought quantum networking out of the lab and onto commercial fiber-optic cables using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that powers today’s web. Reported in Science, the work shows that fragile quantum signals can run on the same infrastructure that carries everyday online traffic. The team tested their approach on Verizon’s campus fiber-optic network. The Penn team’s tiny “Q-chip” coordinates quantum and classical data ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Robot regret: New research helps robots make safer decisions around humans

Cells ‘vomit’ waste to promote healing, mouse study reveals

Wildfire mitigation strategies can cut destruction by half, study finds

Sniffing out how neurons are made

New AI tool identifies 1,000 ‘questionable’ scientific journals

Exploring the promise of human iPSC-heart cells in understanding fentanyl abuse