Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a new type of vaccine that can easily be developed within a week in response to any epidemic. Researchers were able to obtain antigens for Ebola, swine flu and Toxoplasma, the effectiveness of which reached 100 percent. The article was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The vaccine is made up of molecular strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA. They can contain information about any viral, bacterial or any other protein. RNA strands are placed in a vector, a molecule that acts as a delivery system for living cells, where RNA passes through the translation process, resulting in the synthesis of proteins that activate the immune system.
According to scientists, this approach can be applied to the fight not only against infectious diseases, but also to create vaccines that help the body recognize and destroy cancerous tumors.
Most conventional vaccines include inactive forms of viruses or other pathogens. These drugs have been in development for a long time, and some of them pose too much health risk. Other vaccines are made up of proteins that microbes synthesize, but they do not always elicit a strong and sustained immune response. To solve this problem, experts use adjuvants - substances that enhance the response from the body's defense systems.
RNA vaccines produce multiple copies of foreign proteins, which in turn provoke a powerful immune response. The very idea of using RNA for grafting is already 30 years old, but the main obstacle to the introduction of nucleic acids was the search for a safe and effective delivery method. As a vector, the scientists decided to use nanoparticles built from dendrimers - branched molecules. Their positive charge attracts negatively charged RNA, after which the resulting complexes are folded into spherical structures with a diameter of 150 nanometers.
Vaccines can be administered intramuscularly, making them easy to use. Once the nanoparticles enter the body, they stimulate the production of antibodies and T cells. The researchers tested them on mice, which subsequently developed resistance to Ebola and swine flu viruses, as well as toxoplasma (Toxoplasma gondii).
According to scientists, RNA vaccines are safer than DNA vaccines, since the latter can integrate into the cell genome and cause mutations.
