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Keynote presentation 9: Safer-by-design nucleotide therapeutics: embedding translational fidelity into advanced therapy development

Tracks
Track 6
Track 7
Track 8
Thursday, July 16, 2026
4:45 PM - 5:30 PM

Overview

British Toxicology Society (BTS) Lecture I Dr James Thaventhiran


Details

Nucleotide-based advanced therapies, including mRNA and related platform technologies, are transforming pharmacology by enabling rapid, programmable delivery of therapeutic function. However, as these modalities move into broader clinical use, safety-by-design principles must evolve beyond delivery and innate immune sensing to include the fidelity of protein expression itself. In this lecture, I will discuss evidence that nucleoside modification and sequence optimisation can influence translational accuracy, leading to unintended out-of-frame peptide products and off-target immune responses. Drawing on our published work showing that N1-methylpseudouridine can promote +1 ribosomal frameshifting, together with new unpublished data, I will describe how codon-level design safeguards can be used to embed a safer-by-design architecture into nucleotide therapeutics. I will argue that rational control of translational fidelity should become a core design principle for the next generation of nucleotide-based advanced therapies, with relevance across vaccines, immune therapeutics and other emerging RNA medicines.


Speaker

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Prof James E. D. Thaventhiran
MRC Toxicology Unit, University of Cambridge

Safer-by-design nucleotide therapeutics: embedding translational fidelity into advanced therapy development

Biography

Professor James Thaventhiran in an academic clinical immunologist with clinical expertise in primary and secondary immunodeficiency Immunodeficienct patients are stratified by their vaccine responses and his research programme uses the vaccine response as an investigatory immune challenge for people. His research dovetails with his clinical practise with many reports directly relating to patients he has clinically managed. Hisresearch within genetics has described the novel diseases SOCS1, PTPN2 and IL6R deficiencies, moreover it has directly affected clinical management, leading to patients receiving experimental therapy and being offered potentially curative bone-marrow transplantation. Most recently he has explored the immune dysregulation in people with obesity and described the loss of a durable COVID-19 vaccine response in this demographic. His laboratory uses a combination of preclinical models and genetic loss of function studies in people to determine the physiological role of immune pathways in health. The personalisation potential of modified mRNA therapy offers the development of new therapies for patients with rare disease. Despite close to a billion people being treated with modified mRNA, much is still unknown about this revolutionary and novel therapeutic platform. His talk will present his lab’s past and ongoing work towards improving our design and use of modified mRNA.

Session chair

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Slade Matthews
The University of Sydney

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Catriona Waitt
Nihr Professor Of Clinical Pharmacology & Global Health
University Of Liverpool/ Infectious Diseases Institute (Makerere)Makerere Univer

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