3 ms·

Would it be possible to make an "mRNA vaccine" that produces tailocins, or entire bacteriophage viruses? It seems that we're learning how to turn human cells i

• DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
  Literally was just thinking the same thing. Maybe if you put a export tag on it so the cell secreted it, but you'd probably run into glycosylation differences (since these are bacterial proteins naturally) and you'd probably make very little, again because it's a bacterial protein and not one normally made in mammalian cells (like SARS-CoV-2 spike). The approach I would take (just thinking aloud) would be to solve the structure of the tailocin (probably easy by cryoEM since it's highly structured) and work out the business end mechanism then iterate humanizing it while keeping the important bits constant. I guess it boils down to "probably not straight-forward".
• christkv 6y ago
  Is that not by definition a self reproducing virus ?
  • p1mrx 6y ago
    The mRNA vaccine is designed to enter human cells, while the resulting bacteriophage would not be... but if the RNA must be altered to make it human-compatible, then yeah, that's probably a terrible idea.
• shellfishgene 6y ago
  Probably it would have a vaccine effect, so the human immune system would then fight the phage which is the opposite of what you want... Using a "live" phage also has the advantage that it would coevolve with the pathogen, the mRNA produced tailocin is always the same and the pathogens would probably become resistant quickly.
• deleted 6y ago
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