Faster vaccines likely if Moderna effort succeeds
New MRNA technology not fully understood but science points to speed, flexibility
NEW DELHI: Moderna’s experimental vaccine against the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has emerged the front-runner in the global effort to stop the pandemic after an early trial showed it produced virus-neutralising antibodies similar to those found in recovered patients.
It is one of at least 20 experimental nucleic acid vaccines against Covoid-19 in various stages of clinical development that use the messenger RNA (MRNA) platform to elicit an immune response against SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)’S draft landscape of Covid-19 candidate vaccines. Most of these vaccines encode the spike protein of Sarscov2.
“If it is approved, it will be the first messenger RNA (MRNA) vaccine against any disease in the world. We don’t fully know the effectiveness of MRNA vaccines as yet. However, there is high quality science and pre-clinical evidence for this fast and flexible platform for vaccine development. We will have to wait and see,” said Dr Anurag Agrawal, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology, New Delhi.
The new vaccine, called MRNA-1273, encodes for a prefusion stabilised form of the spike (S) protein selected by Moderna in collaboration with the US Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
MRNA vaccines are promising alternatives to conventional vaccine approaches because of their high potency, capacity for rapid development and potential for low-cost manufacture and safe administration.
“This is great news as Rnaand Dna-based vaccines are faster and cheaper to produce than synthetic vaccines as it involves synthetic production of the genetic material, and not the virus. The production is labbased, so it can be quickly standardised and scaled up,” said Dr N K Ganguly, former director general, Indian Council of Medical Research.
Vaccines work by training the body to recognise and respond to the proteins produced by disease-causing organisms, such as a virus or bacteria.
Traditional vaccines use small or inactivated doses of the pathogen (virus or bacterium), or the proteins it produces, to provoke an immune response after vaccination without causing disease.
MRNA vaccines use a synthetic version of the genetic blueprint the virus uses to build its infectious proteins.
The synthetic nucleic acid is inserted into human cells, the humans cells read it as instructions to build fragments of the viral protein, which the immune system attacks by building antibodies against them.
The US pharma company Pfizer, is working on four nucleic acid vaccines, of which three are MRNA; the other one contains self- amplifying MRNA.
There is no approved vaccine for Sars-cov2, although around 120 vaccine candidates are in various stages of clinical trial.
“If MRNA-1273 is successful, it should be ready for commeriail use by January next year,” said Ganguly.
Moderna’s vaccine will be produced by the US government and Swiss contract drugmaker, Lonza Group, which has said it will produce one billion doses a year.
“We are investing to scale up manufacturing so we can maximize the number of doses we can produce to help protect as many people as we can from Sarscov-2,” Moderna Chief Executive Officer, Stéphane Bancel said in a statement.