Vaccines are one of the most effective modern tools for fighting diseases, immunologists say. However, the perfect and reliable vaccine development process has been going on for about 16 years.
Now scientists are already working on the creation of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, trying to speed up development.
The essence of the vaccine is that scientists "teach" the body's immune system to recognize some features of a protein in viruses, which is called an antigen. SARS-CoV-2, like other coronaviruses, is so named because of the crown-like spikes on its surface. Such viruses have three proteins on their surface: a shell, a membrane, and a spike under which RNA is located. The RNA molecule carries the genetic instructions that form the virus itself.
The coronavirus penetrates the cells of the lungs and other respiratory tracts, joining them with its protein spikes. Having penetrated inside, the viral RNA becomes part of the protein production mechanism of the owner's cell. This allows it to create new copies of viral proteins and RNA, which are assembled into thousands of new virus cells to spread the disease.
Thus, one of the ways to stop the disease is to prevent the virus from entering the cell.
Vaccines do just that, training the body to detect and attack viruses before they can infect healthy human cells.
That is why the development of vaccines takes years, because the whole process requires growing viruses and separating them from proteins on the scale required for pharmacology.
Scientists at Vanderbilt University are using alternative approaches. One of them proposes the creation of so-called mRNA vaccines, which do not contain molecular instructions for creating the desired protein. Such preparations do not contain virus particles. However, they provide the body with viral RNA, with the help of which the immune system produces the necessary proteins.
There is currently an experimental mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 called mRNA-1273 and it is already being used in human clinical trials.
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