mRNA Vaccines: From Tackling A Pandemic To Treating Cancer

The story of the multi-decade uphill battle Katalin Karikó and her fellow researchers fought to prove messenger RNA can viably be used in medicine is widely known today. In just as little as two years, the world has learned about mRNA technology and how fast it can react when the need arises holding almost unlimited promises in future applications. As always is the case with “instant hits” in science, the ride was actually very long and bumpy, but more on that later.  What is mRNA? In very simple terms: messenger ribonucleic acids (or mRNAs in short) are the body’s natural way to transport messages from our DNA to our cells, telling cells what kind of proteins they should produce to make sure everything works as expected. We can imagine it as a user manual for IKEA furniture where the instructions are all created from a combination of the four nucleotides that form the “letters” of the RNA.  What does it do in a vaccine? mRNA vaccines differ from earlier vaccines in this: instead of introducing the body to (living or dead [parts of]) the actual pathogen, they carry a set of instructions that allows our bodies to produce a tiny but significant part of the pathogen – without producing the virus itself. In the case of the COVID vaccine, this is the infamous spike protein of COVID.  This illustration created by the WHO helps to understand how we react to different pathogens Why is that good? Replicating the COVID spike pro...
Source: The Medical Futurist - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: TMF Forecast Biotechnology Future of Medicine Nanotechnology cancer cancer research covid19 vaccine research HIV mRNA messenger RNA cancer vaccine malaria malaria vaccine HIV vaccine pancreatic cancer pancreatic cancer va Source Type: blogs