widespread spread provided a critical push toward vaccine research and development that had lagged behind for decades – now with vaccines in development that may help combat health threats like infectious disease or cancer.
For most infectious disease vaccines, scientists begin by identifying the protein encoded by a pathogen and designing a vaccine to target it to provoke a strong immune response. Unfortunately, this process can be complex and time consuming when done traditionally – such as growing it in eggs.
New vaccine technologies have emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic that promise to speed up this process, and researchers are working hard on refining them so they can be applied across a range of diseases. mRNA vaccines in particular are being evaluated and may eventually allow healthcare workers to produce multiple vaccines at once without lengthy production processes.
mRNA vaccines work by injecting cells with short sequences of the mRNA coding for proteins, which they then use to create it themselves and injecting back into their immune systems. This gives immune systems a firsthand view of this protein and allows it to learn its shape and size so they can mount strong responses against it, according to Katalin Kariko, an adjunct professor from University of Pennsylvania who pioneered this approach.
Finding mRNA sequences that code for proteins the immune system will recognize as foreign is key; finding ones closely related to pathogens like flu or MRSA or HIV presents no difficulty; but other diseases present greater challenges.
One of the benefits of mRNA vaccines is their rapid production time and easy administration via patches, making them much faster to administer than traditional vaccines and removing the need for refrigeration storage. Vaxxas, for example, is developing patches to administer measles and rubella vaccinations at school to children while still young – helping address outbreaks caused by parents who haven’t immunized themselves and helping prevent measles outbreaks across many parts of the globe due to failure to vaccinate themselves properly.
