From COVID to Malaria: The potential of mRNA vaccines

Messenger RNA are little helpers. Scientists have long studied their potential in medicine. COVID-19 gave them a chance to prove it. Could malaria be next?

Malaria vaccines have had a slow time of it, lately. Progress on getting a vaccine out into the community has been sluggish.

There is a vaccine called RTS,S which, it is said, protects against about a third of malaria infections. That's been out for a bit and is approved.

Since this year (2021), there is a new vaccine called R21/MatrixM, which has a reported efficacy of 75%. But it has yet to be approved.

And what if there were even better vaccines?

That's what BioNTech founder Ogur Sahin has been thinking. BioNTech coproduces the BioNTech-Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

On July 26, Sahin announced his company would now also focus on a malaria vaccine. They hope to get into clinical trials by the end of the 2022.

BioNTech's proposed malaria vaccine will be based, they say, on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

Along with a vaccine from USbased company Moderna, the BioNTech-Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine has been among the first to use mRNA technology widely

and, according to the current data, successfully.

But what is mRNA technology? And how far have we got with it? Here are some of the most important questions and answers.

How does mRNA work?

RNA stands for ribonucleic acid. Its main task is to convert information (or messages) from the human genome (our DNA) into protein. It takes genetic information and transports it to protein factories within our cells, known as ribosomes, where it's biosynthesized into protein. Some specific proteins, resembling those of pathogens, are

vital for triggering the production of antibodies, which the body uses to fight infections.

Scientists want to take advantage of the process with vaccines that deliver artificially produced mRNA to ribosomes.

The mRNA in vaccines carry the building instructions, as it were, for certain surface proteins of pathogens (Ed.: things that make us sick).

So, in the case of SARSCoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 illness, mRNA vaccines inform our ribosomes about the COVID spike protein — the thing that hooks into our cells and infects us.

The ribosomes produce this this protein themselves and demand an immune response. The body then produces antigens that will target those homemade spike proteins, or in the case of a real COVID-infection, the virus.

And scientists would like to do the same with cancers. They are trying to identify specific characteristics on the surface of cancer cells and develop an artificial mRNA. The hope being that that mRNA would then help the body produce an appropriate immune response to the cancer. The same goes for bacterial infections and so-called plasmodia, such malaria.

What's the difference between mRNA and other vaccines?

The most significant difference between a mRNA vaccine and "live-attenuated" or "dead vaccines" is that those more traditional ones carry disabled viruses with the respective surface proteins with them.

mRNA vaccines, on the other hand, trigger the production of those proteins in the cells.

That makes it easier and quicker for vaccine developers to produce new vaccines and adapt existing vaccines to variants and mutations of a virus. They only need to change specific elements of a vaccine, rather than the whole thing.

How new is the idea of messenger RNA?

The idea is not at all new. In 1961, the biologists Sydney Brenner, Francois Jakob and Matthew Meselson discovered that RNA transported genetic information. They also found that that process could be used to produce proteins in cells.

But it wasn't until 1989 that a virologist called Robert Malone managed to demonstrate the process.

Researchers carried out the first laboratory studies with mRNA vaccines on mice in 1993

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