The vaccines currently in use to prevent COVID-19 have been developed with a newer technique that scientists are trying to use to produce vaccines for HIV, cancer and other diseases.
The COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech, which have been approved for use in the United States and are currently being distributed, were developed using messenger RNA (mRNA). Although scientists have worked to develop vaccines and mRNA therapies for decades, COVID-19 vaccines are the first to be approved for use in humans.
The rapid development and emergency approval of COVID-19 vaccines came about because of huge monetary investments in vaccine production efforts and the good fortune of the pandemic that comes at a time when mRNA technology has become advanced enough to produce a safe vaccine it is efficient. The success inspired companies to accelerate efforts to use the mRNA technique to combat a range of other diseases, with Moderna announcing three new vaccine projects earlier this month.
“The challenging year of 2020 for the whole society has proved to be an extraordinary proof-of-concept period for Moderna,” Moderna CEO, Stéphane Bancel, said in a statement. “Even when we showed that our mRNA-based vaccine can prevent COVID-19, it encouraged us to pursue more ambitious development programs within our prophylactic vaccine modality.”
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Traditional vaccines use modified or killed viruses, or parts of proteins present in the virus, to train the body’s immune system to kill infections before they settle. The new mRNA vaccines stimulate the body to produce the virus protein, which in the case of COVID-19 is the “peak” protein that the coronavirus uses to infect cells, without using anything from the real virus. Unlike the misinformation disseminated online after the launch of the COVID-19 vaccines, mRNA vaccines are unable to alter the human genetic code.
The new projects being developed by Moderna include a possible HIV vaccine, something that scientists have been trying to develop for decades just to repeatedly fail. The use of the mRNA approach offers new hope that an effective vaccine for the virus that causes AIDS can be produced, with a monkey trial showing promising results last year. The company has two candidates in development, both of which are due to begin clinical trials in humans in late 2021.
Moderna is also using the mRNA platform to develop vaccines for common flu viruses. Slower techniques force scientists to guess which strains of the virus will be dominant in the coming flu seasons, leading to vaccines that are only partially effective. Other companies may also be taking this approach, with a Pfizer spokesman saying Newsweek that the company was working on a flu vaccine with BioNTech prior to the COVID-19 project, although further development may be on hold.
The mRNA technique offers significant advantages against rapidly mutating viruses, such as influenza, because candidate vaccines can be quickly updated with genetic sequences of the strains that are actually circulating, potentially producing injections that are much more effective than those being developed with assumptions. anticipated.
“RNA is basically biological code or biological software,” said mRNA expert, Dr. John P. Cooke, to Healthline. “You write the code very quickly and virtually encode any protein we want cells to generate in RNA … If we can get this software into the cell, the cell will follow these instructions and make that protein for us.”
Moderna’s third recently announced program, out of a total of 24 programs the company is working on, aims to develop a vaccine for the Nipah virus, a relatively rare pathogen that is transmitted by infected animals. The virus has killed between 40 and 75 percent of people who contracted it in isolated outbreaks that have occurred in Asia since 2000.
Several companies also hope to fight cancer with mRNA vaccines. Unlike vaccines used to prevent viral infections, cancer vaccines are usually used to fight disease in people who have already developed cancer. Modern has several cancer vaccines in clinical trials, including a personalized melanoma vaccine that is tailored to individual patients. BioNTech is also using the mRNA platform to develop new experimental cancer therapies.
The mRNA technique is being used to develop vaccines and therapies against several other viruses, with trials already carried out or underway for vaccines against Zika, cytomegalovirus and rabies. Vaccines for viruses that can cause some types of cancer, such as the Epstein-Barr virus, are also in development. In addition, research into whether the technique could be useful against autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis is underway, while a possible mRNA-based therapy to help fight heart disease is also being investigated.