Recently I listened to the episode of Stuff You Should podcast on mRNA vaccines and got really surprised on how this new technology works. I don't want to make a long scientific text out of this, so I am going to explain it in a very simple and straightforward way: whereas tradicional vaccines work by injecting the dead or weakened virus into the inoculated person, so that the person's body identifies the virus and creates antibodies to fight it, mRNA vaccines work by taking the information on what the virus looks like inside the inoculated person's defense cells, so that the cells can produce antibodies to fight the virus without having contact with it whatsoever. Even though the mRNA vaccines are not necessarily more efficient than tradicional vaccines, they do have a few advantages. Since mNRA vaccine manufacturers, unlike traditional vaccines manufacturers, don't need to handle the actual viruses to produce the vaccines, the cost, the time and the biological risk to produce such vaccines drop sharply in comparison to the traditional ones. However, the thing that has gotten me specially thrilled about this technology is its potencial to treat cancer. Scientists believe that it's possible to use this technology to train the patient's immune cells to recognize cancer cells, so that the own person's immune system would be capable to destroy the cancer. If it proves to be possible, then we will have a great breakthrough as far as cancer treatment is concerned.