Advances in mRNA Vaccines for Infectious Diseases

It is now admitted that mRNA vaccines provide a safe and long-lasting immune response in humans. Since capping of the mRNA is involved in the protein production into the cells, the capping technologies are of great interest for the development of prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines. In this post, I’ll focus on the CleanCap reagents (Trilink BioTechnologies), and notably the CleanCap AU for the self-amplifying mRNA, as well as their benefits, especially for vaccine approaches against pathogens (including the SARS-CoV-2).

mRNA vaccines are developing very quickly with dozens of ongoing clinical trials against cancers or infectious diseases (e.g. HIV or more recently SARS-Cov-2). Recombinant monoclonal antibody (mAB) based treatments have proven their efficacy. Nevertheless, researchers are now considering using messenger RNA (mRNA) technologies for the development of prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines.

Knock-out of a gene of interest is a useful gene-editing strategy to validate a gene function, to develop a synthetic lethality model or directly mimic a cancer cell in drug screening. Unfortunately, non-dividing cells and hard-to-transfect cells are a major challenge for such genome-editing. However, there is an ideal solution that deserves to be more popular, the use of adenovirus.

This month, a new leap forward in gene editing has been published in Nature under the title ‘Search-and-replace genome editing without double-strand breaks or donor DNA’. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1711-4. Let’s take a look at prime editing to get a clear overview.