Vaccines

Question 1

What is next generation vaccine? What is its main advantage?

Answer 1

Antigen-based vaccine is a type of vaccine that uses antigens to stimulate an immune response in th recipient. The goal is to mimic the presence of the pathogen without causing the disease. The main advantage is that they can be developed fast.

Question 2

What are the different ways we can introduce the pathogenic antigen?

Answer 2

1. Viral vectors
2. Nucleic acid vaccines

Question 3

Hoes does viral vectors work?

Answer 3

1. Clone viral antigen gene into viral vector
2. Inject viral vector
3. Viral vector can be replicating or not
4. Viral vector produces vaccine antigen once they are in body

Question 4

How do nucleic acid-based vaccines work? What is the main advantage?

Answer 4

Major advantage: Nucleic acid-based vaccines can consist of DNA or mRNA and can be adapted quickly when new
viruses emerge. (synthesis in vitro, expensive but fast)
1. Introduce DNA or mRNA into the cells
2. For DNA, we make a synthetic DNA construct encoding the vaccine antigen. Introduce in nucleus with special device
3. For mRNA, use lipid nanoparticles to help mRNA enter cells

Question 5

What are drawbacks of using DNA/mRNA vaccines?

Answer 5

mRNA vaccine is less stable than viral and DNA vaccines.
Both DNA and mRNA require multiple doses.

Question 6

What is a challenge of using mRNA as a vaccine?

Answer 6

Innate immune response is triggered when introducing synthesized mRNA molecule, therefore the cells will be degraded before the mRNA antigen.

Question 7

How do we overcome challenge of mRNA vaccine?

Answer 7

Introduce chemical modifications that are naturally found in mammals to evade the innate immune response. For example, methylated CpG do not elicit innate immune response.