The Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has repeatedly presented the safety of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. National Institutes of Health was advised to finance the national institutes rub their grants any reference to mRNA. Throughout the country, the legislatures of the States are considering bills to prohibit or limit these vaccines, a Weapons of mass destruction.
While mrnm, or messenger RNA, has received broad attention in recent years, scientists have discovered it for the first time in 1961. They studied it and explored its promise to prevent infectious diseases and treat cancer and rare diseases since.
What is mRNA?
A large molecule found in all our cells, mRNA is used to make each protein that our DNA orders our body. He does so by carrying DNA information in the nucleus to protein manufacturing machines from a cell. A single mRNA molecule can be used to make many copies of a protein, but it is naturally scheduled to die, said Jeff Glass, professor of Biology and RNA therapy at Johns Hopkins University and co-founder of a RNA therapy company.
How do mRNA vaccines work?
Currently, there are three vaccines approved by the available FDA that use mRNA, two for COVID-19 and one for RSV, or syncytial respiratory viruses, in the elderly. These vaccines are made up of mRNA strands which code for specific viral proteins.
Say you get a COVVI-19 vaccine. Arrnm shutters, wrapped in tiny fat particles, enter your muscle and immune cells, said Robert Alexander Wesselhoeft, director of the Therapeutics RNA at the Gene and Cell Therapy Institute in Mass General Brigham. The protein factories in the cells then take the instructions of the mRNA and make a protein like that found on the surface of a COVVI-19 virus. Your body recognizes this protein as a stranger and sets up an immune response.
Most of the mRNA will have disappeared in a few days, but the body preserves a “memory” in the form of antibodies, said Dr. Coler. As with other types of vaccines, immunity decreases both in time and as a virus evolves towards new variants.
Why are mRNA vaccines used now?
In the mid -2000s, scientists from the University of Pennsylvania understood how to integrate foreign mRNA into human cells without it deteriorating first. This allowed researchers to develop it for use in vaccines.
The main use of these vaccines at the moment is to prevent infectious diseases, such as COVID-19 and RSV, said Dr Wesselhoeft, which founded a company that develops therapies by RNA. Arnm vaccines can be made very quickly because all components, other than RNA sequence, remain the same in different vaccines.
This feature could be useful for developing the annual flu vaccine, said Florian Krammer, virologist at the Icahn Medicine School of Mount Sinai, who previously consulted Pfizer and Curevac on Arnm therapies. As a general rule, scientists decide in February or March that the strains of the influenza virus to include in a vaccine that will be deployed in the United States in September. But at that time, a different strain can be dominant. Because a mRNA vaccine can be manufactured faster than the current flu vaccine, scientists could wait until May or June to see which strains circulate, said Dr. Krammer, increasing the probability that the vaccine is effective.
Are these vaccines risks?
A common question that the patients asked are if a vaccine against mRNA can affect their DNA, said Dr. Boucher. The answer is no. Our cells cannot convert MRNA into DNA, which means that it cannot be incorporated into our genome.
The COVVI-19 vaccine can cause muscle pain and Flulike symptoms, but these are expected side effects for vaccines in general, said Dr. Krammer.
It has been more than four years since the COVVI-19 vaccine has been deployed for the first time “and there are no long-term security signals,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, specialist in pediatric infectious diseases in New York. Many parents were concerned about myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle which has been reported as a possible side effect of the vaccine. But, said Dr. Ratner, the risk of such an inflammation from a real COVID-19 infection, or long or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, was much greater.
What else can other mRNA be used?
Vaccines using mRNA are currently being studied for a wide range of diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes and rare diseases such as cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition that causes excessively thick and sticky mucus that can plug the respiratory tract and damage lungs.
In cancer, the idea is that the mRNA code for a tumor protein that the immune system will recognize as a stranger, telling the body to attack the tumor. In a genetic disorder such as cystic fibrosis, it codes for a functional version of a deficient protein to replace that defective and restore mucus to a healthy state.
An article in the journal Nature earlier this year has shown that An experimental mRNA vaccine For pancreatic cancer, caused an immune response in some patients after undergoing cancer surgery. Patients who knew this immune response lived longer cancer than patients who did not do so.
Another recent article has shown that, in monkeys, a Inhaled mRNA therapy Could produce a protein necessary to form eyelashes, the hair structures that line our respiratory tract and remove mucus. These proteins operate in a debilitating respiratory disorder called primary ciliary dyskinesia.
This research is still at the start of the stages: the study on pancreatic cancer, a phase I test, included only 16 patients, and there may have been other differences between the two groups which represented the different survival times. There is a long history of research showing that interventions can lead to immune responses without really changing the results of the patients, said Dr. Steven Rosenberg, head of the surgical branch at the National Cancer Institute and Immunotherapy Expert on Cancer.
Dr. Richard Boucher, a pulmonologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, noted that for pulmonary diseases, it is extremely difficult to obtain the particles safely transporting mRNA in exactly the good cells.
In general, said Dr. Ratner, mRNA vaccines are “exciting” in that they offer hope for the treatments of the disease where previous technologies have failed. But mRNA therapy is always a drug technology like the others: in certain diseases, it will probably work, he said, “and in other cases, this will probably not be the case.”
