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CoronaVirusvaccine.pptx
How The Coronavirus Virus Vaccine Was Made
The Key Ingredient
The key ingredient in the vaccine is messenger RNA. mRNA takes the instructions inscribed in DNA and delivers it to the protein-making parts of a cell. Messenger RNA is a powerful, but fickle, component of life’s building blocks. It's a workhorse of the cell but is also truly just a messenger, meaning that it's unstable and prone to degrade. Some scientists believed from the start that it would be possible to repurpose this basic cellular function for medicine.
How It Is Used
It could encode fragments of virus to teach the immune system to defend against pathogens. It also creates whole proteins that are missing or damaged in people with genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.
Scientists had trouble getting RNA into cells because it is so fragile. And even when they succeeded, they discovered that RNA caused an inflammatory reaction.
They eventually discovered a way to modify RNA, by chemically tweaking one of the letters of its code, so it didn’t trigger an inflammatory response.
They then developed a nanoparticle to deliver messenger RNA to a special cell type that could take the code and turn it into a protein on its surface to provoke the immune system. This was key to being able to use a tiny amount of material. Each dose of mRNA vaccine developed against the coronavirus relies on an amount that’s about a fifth the weight of a penny to stimulate a powerful immune response.
How it works
All vaccines are based on the same underlying idea: training the immune system to block a virus. While old-fashioned vaccines do this work by injecting dead or weakened viruses. Newer vaccines use bits or spikes of the virus, such as proteins on their surface. The messenger RNA, doesn’t take as long to develop because those virus bits don’t have to be generated in a lab. Instead, the vaccine delivers a genetic code that instructs cells to build those characteristic proteins themselves.
How It's Delivered
The stabilized spike was just one piece of a vaccine. They also needed a technology that could deliver it into the body and had already been working with Moderna, using its messenger RNA technology to create a vaccine against a different bat virus, Nipah, as a rehearsal for the real pandemic.
On Jan. 13, Moderna began translating the stabilized spike protein into their platform. The company began making the vaccine almost right away because of its experience manufacturing experimental cancer vaccines
Conclusion
Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress made by the coronavirus vaccine shifts the paradigm for what’s possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in the future.
Work Cited:
Johnson, Carolyn Y. “A Gamble Pays off in 'Spectacular Success': How the Leading Coronavirus Vaccines Made It to the Finish Line.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 8 Dec. 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/12/06/covid-vaccine-messenger-rna/.
