(credit: City of Columbus)
Vaccination has improved health and lengthened life spans over the last two centuries, but it takes time to develop vaccines in response to emergent health threats. A paper published in PNAS presents a new type of nanoparticle vaccine technology using RNA to encode proteins that trigger immune responses. This new vaccine technology could allow us to respond more quickly to new threats, potentially saving many lives during future outbreaks.
Currently, four types of vaccines are commonly used. Inactivated vaccines contain bacterial cells or viruses that are killed or inactivated—they can’t replicate, but they can produce an immune response. Attenuated vaccines contain live bacteria or viruses that have low virulence, so they will evoke an immune response, but won’t cause a full-fledged infection. Virus-like particle vaccines contain the shell of a virus, but lack any genetic material. Finally, subunit vaccines contain proteins derived from the infectious agent, which can provoke an immune response without introducing the pathogen.
The new vaccine technology presented in this paper relies on what’s called “replicon mRNA,” which is based on a deactivated virus. It can make copies of itself and trigger the production of the proteins it encodes but can’t make new viruses, so it never escapes beyond the cells it first gets into. Replicon mRNA can be used to produce large quantities of specific proteins within the body, which in turn can provoke an immune response against those proteins.
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