Since messenger RNA (mRNA) first rose to prominence as the basis for COVID-19 vaccines in 2020, its promise in medicine has exploded. Today, potential applications range from vaccines for infectious diseases and cancer to treatments for autoimmune and rare genetic diseases, regenerative medicine, and more.

mRNA therapeutics hold promise to transform medicine as we know it, but the current multistep techniques for making mRNA are far too expensive and slow for the therapy to realize its full potential. Waterfall Scientific™, a start-up supported by the UMass Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS), aims to meet this challenge with its patented DuoTether™ technology that enables continuous flow synthesis and seamless scaling while reducing time and costs. Waterfall Scientific is built upon research led by Craig Martin, emeritus professor of chemistry at UMass Amherst, and Sarah Perry, Gary R. Lapidus Professor at UMass Amherst’s Riccio College of Engineering.

Waterfall Scientific was recently awarded up to $54.5 million by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to lead a six-company consortium in revolutionizing the production of medical-grade mRNA. The contract was part of $125 million recently released by ARPA-H for the research and development of made-to-order genetic medicines.

“The goal of the ARPA-H contract is to develop an end-to-end platform for manufacturing high-quality mRNA personalized therapeutics that are ready to go within seven days while significantly reducing costs,” says Martin. “This is going to be transformative.”
 

Why mRNA May Be the Future of Medicine

While the scientific community has long believed that mRNA could be the future of medicine, this vision is starting to become a reality, with many companies actively developing mRNA therapeutics.

As Martin explains, illnesses have traditionally been treated with medicines that come from outside the human body, such as herbs and chemicals. A newer approach involves biologics—including gene replacement therapies used to treat a wide range of illnesses by delivering proteins to the body that are missing or damaged. “In general, biologics harness the power of biology to offer exquisite specificity,” says Martin.

But this process can be taken one step further with mRNA. “Instead of making the protein in some other organism and delivering it to humans, we can make the RNA that encodes the protein, deliver that RNA as the biologic, and the patient’s own cells then make that protein from the delivered RNA,” Martin explains. When the patient’s own cells make the protein, it eliminates room for error. Moreover, “Once you know how to make the RNA for one disease, it’s comparatively easy to swap in a different RNA so it can treat another disease. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, saving money, and crucially—saving time,” he says.

In August 2026, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved an mRNA-based flu vaccine from Moderna, which was shown to be about 27 percent more effective at preventing flu-like illness compared to standard flu shots. This is because mRNA vaccines can be made much faster, allowing the company to specifically tailor them to the current season’s flu variant.

Also in August 2026, Moderna and Merck announced positive results in a major phase 3 clinical trial of an mRNA-based cancer vaccine in terms of preventing recurrence of melanoma. Cancer therapeutics are a prime example of where mRNA holds great promise, says Martin, because of the highly personalized nature of cancer. “Cancer creates different mutations in the cells of each patient. The idea is that an mRNA vaccine could be customized to target those specific mutations in a particular patient to treat their cancer.”

mRNA is also the backbone of customized gene editing therapies for rare genetic diseases, like the therapy used by a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to successfully treat baby KJ.

Despite these exciting advances, developing such personalized mRNA therapeutics remains extremely costly and time-intensive, taking many months or even years. “Patients with advanced-stage cancer or rare genetic diseases often don’t have the luxury of time,” says Martin. With the ARPA-H contract, Waterfall Scientific and the other companies aim to dramatically reduce the time to bring personalized therapeutics to market.
 

The Path to Waterfall

Martin has conducted pioneering research to synthesize RNA for more than 35 years. His collaboration with Perry, which ultimately led to Waterfall Scientific, started in 2018 when Martin’s mRNA work was used as a case study in Perry’s UMass course, Microfluidics and Microscale Analysis in Materials and Biology. Together, Martin’s chemistry and Perry’s chemical engineering led the pair to invent and refine a technique for synthesizing mRNA with unmatched efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.

“I make microscale devices—think of a complex chemical refinery, but with equipment that is the size of a human hair. My lab is inventing the machines that will be able to automatically generate long RNA,” says Perry, an expert in microfluidics, a crucial technique for precisely engineering the flow of chemicals at the microscale.

Today, Martin is president and chief strategy officer of Waterfall Scientific, and Perry is chair of the start-up’s Technical Advisory Board. But translating their cutting-edge research into a successful company required a different set of expertise and resources than what they each brought to the project. That’s where IALS came in.

“I was initially clueless about how to start a company,” says Martin, who has been working with IALS for years to develop Waterfall Scientific and has received multiple seed-funding awards, including a Manning/IALS Innovation Award and an IALS Translational Seed Award. “Sarah Perry and I were continuing to advance our technology with federal grants, and at the same time IALS was helping connect me with investors, schooling me in how to pitch them and build Waterfall from a company on paper to one with a leadership team, employees, and a lab space in Worcester at the Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives incubator—one of the few wet-lab spaces in western Massachusetts that offers spaces for new start-ups.”

Bridging the Gap Between Academic Research and a Marketable Solution

IALS was founded in 2014 with more than $150 million from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts through the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center and UMass Amherst. With 25 state-of-the-art research facilities and cutting-edge equipment, IALS provides seed funding, incubation space, and venture mentoring to nurture fledgling companies seeking to attract outside investors.

“There are three main ways that we bridge the gap between academic research and a marketable solution,” says Peter Reinhart, IALS’s founding director. “We offer bespoke entrepreneurial mentoring tailored to the specific idea and the shape of the market niche it could occupy. We also maintain a robust network of business and patent attorneys, seed-funding organizations, venture capital groups—everyone that can play a role in launching a successful company. And we provide seed funding ourselves to help shepherd start-ups, like Waterfall Scientific, through the ‘valley of death’—that dry stretch in the transition from brilliant idea to financially viable product, which many great ideas can’t survive.”

As in the case of Waterfall, Reinhart points to IALS’s role in “de-risking” the long journey from a research idea to a successful company. Truly innovative approaches—like Martin’s and Perry’s—are by their nature unproven. Few investors have the stomach to back something that has never been done before, especially when the idea comes from a first-time founder.

“When we significantly reduce that risk through mentoring and seed funding, we can help create a company that is much more attractive to investors,” says Reinhart. “It can be a long process, but with companies like Waterfall, we’re seeing that initial investment from the state and from UMass Amherst pay off.”

“Ultimately,” Martin says, “this is all about changing lives, whether by preventing or treating diseases, crafting personalized therapeutics, training the Massachusetts workforce, or building economic resilience out here in western Massachusetts.”

This story was originally published in October 2026. Daegan Miller contributed reporting.