The mRNA Story: When Infrastructure Meets Opportunity
In the spring of 2020, the world watched as scientists developed an entirely new class of vaccines in record time. The mRNA vaccines from Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer were hailed as miraculous — a triumph of modern science. But the real story began decades earlier, in underfunded labs and overlooked journals.
The long road to overnight success
Katalin Kariko spent the better part of the 1990s trying to convince anyone who would listen that messenger RNA could be used therapeutically. Her grant applications were rejected. She was demoted. The scientific establishment largely dismissed her work as impractical.
The problem wasn’t just skepticism — it was discoverability. Kariko’s early papers existed in the literature, but they were buried beneath an avalanche of publications. Researchers working on adjacent problems had no easy way to find her work, connect it to their own, and build on it.
The infrastructure gap
This is the fundamental challenge that Axy was built to address. Scientific knowledge doesn’t fail because researchers aren’t brilliant — it fails because the infrastructure for connecting ideas across disciplines, across time, and across institutions simply doesn’t exist at the scale required.
Consider the numbers:
- Over 3 million scientific papers are published every year
- The average researcher reads roughly 250 papers per year
- Cross-disciplinary citations have been declining as a percentage of total citations since the 1990s
The mRNA story is not an isolated case. It’s a pattern that repeats across every field of science: transformative insights sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone to connect the dots.
What could have been different
Imagine a world where an AI-powered knowledge graph had existed in 2005. A researcher studying lipid nanoparticles for drug delivery might have been connected to Kariko’s work on modified nucleosides. A immunologist working on dendritic cells could have discovered that mRNA delivery was already being explored with promising results.
The connections were all there in the literature. What was missing was the infrastructure to surface them.
Building the future of discovery
At Axy, we believe the next Kariko is out there right now — a researcher whose work will one day be recognized as foundational, but who today struggles to find funding, collaborators, and visibility.
Our knowledge graph is designed to make those hidden connections visible. By mapping the relationships between papers, concepts, researchers, and institutions, we’re building the infrastructure that science has always needed but never had.
The mRNA story teaches us that scientific breakthroughs don’t come from nowhere. They come from decades of work, often by people the establishment has overlooked. The least we can do is build tools that make sure their work is found.
This is the first in a series of posts exploring how better scientific infrastructure could accelerate discovery. Follow along as we dig into more stories of hidden connections and missed opportunities in the history of science.