2 ms·
It boils down to the mRNA process being faster and more of a sure thing for a novel virus. I hope there are eventually many more effective protein based vaccine
by superkuh 5y ago
It boils down to the mRNA process being faster and more of a sure thing for a novel virus. I hope there are eventually many more effective protein based vaccines approved.
The problem with expressing your protein in some animal cell is that often times there are sugars that cells add to proteins and they differ by lifeform type. So the protein will end up shaped different in a yeast than in a animal cell. Additionally, growing in a third party host lifeform often leads to situations where you can't get it to grow in the host anymore because the virus changes.
- baybal2 5y agoThe sure thing for a novel virus, as I understood, is an inactivated vaccine. For everything else, you are never sure if the biotech tricks, with all their intricacies, will work in that individual case.
- superkuh 5y agoWell, you're sure to get something with an inactivated viral particle. But you're not sure to get a usefully efficient protection from exposure to it. The problem with inactivated viral particles is the inactivation process, neccessarily, breaks the proteins and cause them to be liable to take up non-realistic shapes. When your immune system trains on the non-realistic shape the antibodies don't neutralize as well. See the sinovac inactivated sars-cov-2 vaccine for an example of this type of vaccine not working out (ie, <50% efficient).