What about mrna -vaccines

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has repeatedly questioned the safety of MRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Scientists with financing the National Institutes of Health were advised Scrub their subsidies From every reference to mrna. Throughout the country, the state legislators are considering prohibiting or limiting such vaccines, whereby someone describes them as Weapons of mass destruction.

While MRNA, or Messenger RNA, has received widespread attention in recent years, scientists discovered it for the first time in 1961. They studied and investigated his promise in preventing infectious diseases and treating cancer and rare diseases since then.

What is mrna?

A large molecule that is found in all our cells is used to make every protein that leads our DNA our body to build. It does this by wearing information from DNA in the core to the protein machines of a cell. A single MRNA molecule can be used to make many copies of a protein, but it is of course programmed to die eventually, said Jeff Coller, a professor in RNA biology and therapeutic at Johns Hopkins University and a co-founder of an RNA therapy company.

How do mrna -vaccines work?

At the moment there are three vaccines approved by the FDA that mrna, two use for COVID-19 and one for RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, in older adults. These vaccines consist of mrna strands that code for specific viral proteins.

Suppose you get a Covid-19 vaccine. The strands of mrna, packed in small thick particles, go into your muscle and immune cells, said Robert Alexander Wesselhoft, director of RNA Therapeutics at the Gene and Celapy Institute in Mass General Brigham. Protein factories in the cells then take instructions from the MRNA and produce a protein such as it on the surface of a COVID-19 virus. Your body acknowledges that protein as strange and draws up an immune response.

The majority of the mrna will disappear within a few days, but the body retains a “memory” in the form of antibodies, Dr. Coller. Just as with other types of vaccines, the immunity takes both over time and as a virus develops into new variants.

Why are MRNA vaccines now being used?

In the mid -2000s, scientists from the University of Pennsylvania found out how they could get strange mrna in human cells without the first breaking. This enabled researchers to develop it for use in vaccines.

The most important use for such vaccines is currently to prevent infectious diseases, such as COVID-19 and RSV, Dr. Wesselhoft, who has established a company that develops RNA therapies. The MRNA vaccines can be made very quickly because all components, apart from the RNA sequence, remain the same in different vaccines.

This function can be useful for developing the annual flu vaccine, said Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine on Mount Sinai, who has previously consulted for Pfizer and Curevac about MRNA therapies. In February or March, scientists usually decide to include influenza virus tribes in a vaccine that will be rolled out in the United States in September. But by that time a different tension can be dominant. Because an MRNA vaccine can be produced faster than the current flu shot, scientists can wait until May or June to see which trunks are circulating, Dr. Krammer, which increases the chance that the vaccine will be effective.

Do these vaccines have risks?

A common question that patients ask is whether an mrna vaccine can influence their DNA, Dr. Boucher. The answer is no. Our cells cannot convert mrna into DNA, which means that it cannot be included in our genome.

The vaccine for COVID-19 can cause muscle pain and flulike symptoms, but these are expected side effects for vaccines in general, Dr. Krammer.

It is more than four years since the COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out for the first time “and there are no long-term safety signals,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a specialist in infectious diseases in children in New York. Many parents were worried about myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that was reported as a possible side effect of the vaccine. But, Dr. said Ratner, the risk of such inflammation due to an actual COVID-19 infection, or long Covid or multisystem-inflammatory syndrome in children, was much greater.

What else can MRNA be used for?

Vaccines that use MRNA are currently studied for a wide range of diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases, car -immune disorders such as type 1 diabetes and rare diseases such as cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that results in an extremely thick, sticky mucus That can connect the airways and damage the lungs.

With cancer, the idea is that the mrna codert for a tumor protein that will recognize the immune system as strange and tell the body to attack the tumor. In a genetic condition such as cystic fibrosis, it codes for a functioning version of a deficient protein to replace the defective and to restore the mucus to a healthy state.

A paper in the magazine Nature earlier this year showed that An experimental mrna vaccine For pancreatic cancer, cancer caused an immune response in some patients after they had undergone surgery for cancer. Patients who experience that immune response lived longer without cancer than patients who did not.

Another recent article showed that, with monkeys, a Inhaled MRNA therapy could produce a protein needed to form Cilia, the hairy structures that shut off our airways and move mucus out of it. These proteins work malfunction in a debilitating respiratory disorder called primary ciliary dyskinesia.

This research is still at an early stage: the Pancreatic cancer research, a phase I study, only included 16 patients, and there may have been other differences between the two groups responsible for the different survival times. There is a long history of research that shows that interventions can lead to immune reactions without actually changing the results of patients, Dr. Steven Rosenberg, head of the surgical branch on the National Cancer Institute and an expert in cancerimmunotherapy.

Dr. Richard Boucher, a pulmonologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, noted that it is extremely difficult for lung diseases to get the particles safely in exactly the right cells.

In general, Dr. said Ratner, his mrna vaccines ‘exciting’ because they offer hope for disease treatments where previous technologies have failed. But MRNA therapy is still a drug technology like any other: it will probably work with some diseases, he said, “And in other cases it probably won’t.”