mRNA: Vaccines Of The Future!
What makes mRNA vaccines so special, and why are we in the medical community hyped about the potential?
12.7 BILLION shots have been given.
It’s difficult to get the stats on which manufacturer has given how many doses for the entire globe (China and Russia famously made their own vaccines and I can’t easily find data about them. If you have it, let me know), but in Europe and America, around 90% of those vaccines were mRNA vaccines.
That’s an incredible amount of vaccines and only rare complications have occurred. There are going to be complications with any treatment, and this is the largest vaccination effort in human history. To consider that, you need to realize that even taking something as simple as Tylenol has its risk. 2,600 hospitalization and 500 deaths are attributed to acetaminophen (paracetamol) every year in the US alone!
While it is undoubtedly that some poor individuals have had terrible reactions to the vaccine, it is important to remember that nearly 20 million people had their lives spared. This is an incredibly safe medication.
But what makes the mRNA vaccines so different?
For starters, it’s not the virus! We are not injecting your body with fragments or parts of the virus. No more trying to damage the virus just right, we’re only giving you a piece of non-replicating code that your cells will use on their own to make the antibodies it needs to fight off covid.
How does this work?
Let’s look at a bit of cell biology.
To start with your cells are not just bubbles filled with DNA. They are bubbles filled with many different pieces of machinery used to do very specific tasks.
See all those things floating around outside of the nucleolus? Those are the machinery, and they produce the proteins your body needs to work! But each little piece needs to have instructions, and those instructions are coded in the DNA. How do you get that code out?
With mRNA!
You can think of mRNA as a copy of a master. Let’s say you have one piece of paper with instructions, but you need to give several different members of your team. You can’t let them have your copy, or you wouldn’t have one. You could go to each one individually and let them read your paper, but a better solution is to just use a copy machine and make copies!
mRNA is that copy! It’s a copy of a piece of your DNA that tells the machinery in your cells what to do.
In the case of the vaccine, we specifically make mRNA that codes for a piece of the virus. Not the entire virus, and the mRNA cannot replicate. The mRNA is picked up by your immune cells and the machinery makes the protein your immune system uses to produce antibodies.
If you felt unwell after the vaccine, that is your immune system producing antibodies against the potential viral infection.
The key reason we (as doctors) are so excited about how well this vaccine worked is the implications it has for future work.
mRNA is incredibly adaptable. It is entirely possible (and already in testing) to make new vaccines for previously unvaccinatable diseases. Studies are ongoing to target HIV, rabies, cytomegalovirus, and many others.
The most exciting (in my opinion) is targeting cancer with mRNA vaccines. At the moment it looks like individual patient vaccines would have to be created, but the potential is there!
