How does the new COVID-19 vaccine work?

Decades of development behind mRNA as an off-the-shelf technology allows pharmaceutical companies to pivot technology from one target (cancer) to another (COVID-19) for rapid launch. However, they generally remain new.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which is scheduled for emergency use permission for adults on Friday, December 11, and the Moderna vaccine, which is expected to receive the same permission after the meeting on Thursday, are the first approved vaccines to utilize mRNA. ..

So what is mRNA?

There is nothing that can be accidentally infected due to changes. Since the 1950s, vaccine programs have saved billions of lives worldwide by culturing and then injecting killed (inactivated) or attenuated (attenuated) forms of the virus of concern. ..

All shots of hepatitis A, flu, polio and rabies use an inactivated virus (part of the viral protein). On the other hand, measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox fight by receiving an attenuated form of the live virus in question.

Both of these vaccines have been shown to introduce enough pathogens to provoke an immune response. This is available even in contact with the real thing.

Mass production of live virus vaccines requires chicken eggs or other mammalian cells to multiply them, a method that has proven both successful and safe.That way, they carry Risk of rare adverse events It’s like an infection or allergic reaction due to contamination during the cell culture process. On the other hand, inactivated viruses are killed by chemicals and are often weak, so the immune response is often weak and requires booster shots.

Alternatively, the mRNA platform has been studied for decades and we hope to find its use as a vaccine for cancer someday. Instead of introducing dead or weakened viruses into the body, mRNA vaccines teach recipients to make their own pieces of the virus. In other words, when you inoculate the mRNA vaccine, you will have a chicken egg, which is a Petri dish for producing fragments of coronavirus.

Therefore, mRNA cuts out the middleman.

The mRNA platform does this by identifying specific genetic instructions that the body uses to make the bare essentials of the virus. In this case, you will find that part is a familiar spike protein on the surface of all coronaviruses. The entire RNA strand of the COVID-19 virus may be long, but the description of how to produce only peplomer proteins is small.

After recreating the lab instructions at low cost, the drug company put the RNA in a messenger to keep it safe. It is a lipid shell. The mRNA vaccine is then injected into the muscle, where the RNA is taken up by nearby cells. Those cells begin to make spike proteins, which are flushed into the bloodstream.

These spikes are cell debris because they are not attached to the rest of the genetic code of the coronavirus. Nevertheless, your immune system looks at them, surrounds them, and creates antigens that remain ready for a genuine appearance.

We do not know how long these antigens will last, but it is estimated that 9 months is possible.

So what happens to the mRNA commands placed in your body? Will they stay in the organization and cause immense problems in the future? Do they work for Bill Gates?

Concerns turned out to be the exact opposite-RNA is so fragile that it may not even work as intended. Therefore, injecting the designer’s genetic instructions may seem scary, but its dilution requires that it must be stored at a very low temperature to prevent lysis.

“It essentially disappears after a while,” says Dr. Avi Nashberg, a Mayo Clinic vaccine expert. “This is a very interesting and novel way to actually make proteins in our body without getting the virus or the entire genome of the virus.”

While all mRNA technologies raise concerns about the potential for autoimmune reactions, vaccines in the process of being distributed today show few side effects in large 60-day trials.

Patients in the United Kingdom had two severe allergic reactions. These may allow providers to take precautions against recipients who are prone to anaphylactic reactions.

“For people with serious allergies, we may have to add certain safety standards,” Burke said. “In addition to a history of rashes, there is also a history of serious allergies, such as having previously had anaphylaxis and carrying an epinephrine pen.”