RNAV8 Bio receives $4.4 million ARPA-H award for mRNA medicine research

Cambridge, Mass., September 1, 2026 — RNAV8 Bio, a biotechnology company leveraging AI-driven design and laboratory validation to enhance the predictability of mRNA medicines, has been selected to receive a one-year, $4.4 million ARPA-H pilot award. This funding will support RNAV8 Bio's participation in the PROPEL program, a collaborative effort led by the Rouskin Lab at Harvard Medical School and the Weissman Lab at MIT/Whitehead Institute.

The PROPEL program aims to harness the natural folding behavior of RNA to create logic-gated therapeutic constructs. These constructs can be precisely controlled to activate only where and when intended, without altering the genome. The program is managed by ARPA-H Program Manager Shannon Greene, Ph.D.

According to Devan Shah, Founder and CEO of RNAV8 Bio, "The RNA world has long held the promise of programmability. However, the relationship between an RNA's sequence and its function has been notoriously unpredictable. Our goal is to bridge that gap by uncovering the rules that connect sequence to function and integrating them into logic-gated constructs. This will enable us to dial protein expression in response to small molecules, creating a dose as a precision tool for therapeutic application."

Within the PROPEL initiative, RNAV8 Bio focuses on the therapeutic format itself. The company screens protein output from pools of transfected mRNA, engineers untranslated regions (UTRs) for delivery, and validates results at the cargo level. For instance, RNAV8 Bio drives cell-type-selective expression of therapeutic payloads such as gene-editing enzymes or CAR constructs.

Shah elaborates, "Most current medicines act indiscriminately, while genetic therapies often involve permanent changes to DNA. PROPEL takes a different approach. By manipulating RNA's UTRs, we can control how much protein is produced. A small molecule binding to a fold in the RNA causes a structural rearrangement, effectively turning a dose into a dial for protein expression, without altering the genome."

Silvi Rouskin, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Microbiology at Harvard Medical School, underscores the significance of this work. "For decades, we've read RNA sequences as instructions for making proteins. Now, we can analyze how these sequences fold and how small molecules can change those folds to alter protein output. Human cells likely use this structural control, but we've lacked the tools to find it systematically. PROPEL is our effort to map and utilize these structures."

Jonathan Weissman, Ph.D., Professor of Biology at MIT and Member of the Whitehead Institute, adds, "The untranslated regions flanking a message are among the most powerful and least explored elements in determining how much protein a cell makes. By screening these elements across cell types, we can identify those that set expression specifically in certain cells, turning vague notions of 'regulation' into a precise and reusable parts list."

The collaboration aims to produce a comprehensive map of how thousands of human RNA sequences respond to small molecules, with structural models. It also seeks to rank UTR elements that set translation in specific cell types and engineer UTRs that achieve meaningful selectivity in therapeutic formats.

Shah concludes, "By the end of the initial phase, we hope to have resources that do not exist today: a map of RNA sequence responses to small molecules, structural models, and a ranked catalogue of UTR elements that set expression in specific cells. These resources will form a generalizable, disease-agnostic foundation for RNA medicine."

The PROPEL program brings together the Rouskin Lab, the Weissman Lab, and RNAV8 Bio to develop a programmable, drug-tunable control layer for RNA medicines. The collaboration is expected to significantly enhance the precision and efficacy of RNA-based therapies, marking a pivotal step in the field of biotechnology.