Ah the hubris. I can't check the original paper because the DOI is missing (and I don't have time to go searching). But my takeaway is they are avoiding protei

Ah the hubris. I can't check the original paper because the DOI is missing (and I don't have time to go searching). But my takeaway is they are avoiding protein targeting altogether. Typical vaccines for something like SARS will target the SARS spike protein which looks a bit like a rose on a stem. The stem is the part that sits in the body of the SARS itself, while the rose petals are the bit that your immune system actually can see. As a result, the rose petals mutate quite frequently, meaning that your immune system is constantly chasing a moving target. Whereas the stem can't mutate nearly as easily without breaking and making the virus ineffective. This is a common viral strategy. Viruses coat the parts that they can't mutate due to their structure-function importance with parts they can mutate easily because they are mostly just decoration. That way, your immune system only sees the easily changed decoration. Rather than target the proteins with antibodies, they are not worry about the virus entering the cell, and are instead targeting the viral genomes by making complementary RNA molecules (i.e. the inverse of the viruses ssRNA genome). This means that when the virus unwraps its genome in your cell, this vaccine will immediately bind to the genome and prevent it from being read/replicated. This isn't completely novel, your body already does this naturally, but viruses typically have pieces that will prevent your body's natural response from working. They must have found a way around that. Also, they must have solved the delivery mechanism somehow? RNA is notoriously unstable and doesn't usually make a suitable vaccine for that reason, although recent mRNA vaccines have also solved this problem I guess. It's not clear if it's an mRNA vaccine that produces the iRNA, or if they're delivering the iRNA directly.