The night is darker just before morning, they say. It’s definitely dark right now. The more infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2 emanating from the UK and South Africa will exacerbate the pandemic before a major vaccine can improve.
But take another look at some of these new vaccines. And then think of the day ahead – not only its first rays in the coming months but also the bright light of the years and decades to come. It looks more plausible that the same weapons we use to defeat Covid-19 can also take away even grim papers – including cancer, which nearly 10 million people are killed each year.
The most promising Covid vaccines use a nucleic acid called messenger RNA, or mRNA. One vaccine comes from German company BioNTech SE and its US partner Pfizer Inc. The other is from US company Moderna Inc. (his original spelling was ModeRNA, his ticket is MRNA). Another is on the way from CureVac NV, which is also based in Germany.
Conventional vaccines tend to be inactivated or attenuated viruses that, when introduced into the body, stimulate an immune response that may protect against the live pathogen. But such a chemical process requires different chemicals and cell cultures. This will take time and provide opportunities for pollution.
MRNA vaccines do not have these problems. They direct the body itself to make the offensive proteins – in this case, the ones circulating around SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA. The immune system then stays in touch with these antigens, working for the day when the same proteins appear with the associated coronavirus.
There ‘s a bigger promise of mRNA: It can tell our cells whatever protein we want. That includes antigens of many other diseases in addition to Covid-19.
In its daily work, mRNA takes control from its molecular cousin, the DNA in our cell nuclei. The genome, which carries the mRNA into the cytoplasm, is replicated, where small cell factories called ribosomes do not use the information to bury proteins.
BioNTech and Moderna shorten this process, by jumping out of the entire violin industry in the nucleus with the DNA. Instead, they first find out what protein they want – for example, a spike on the coat around a virus. They then look at the series of amino acids that make up this protein. From there they discover the detailed instructions that mRNA must provide.
This process can be very quick, which is why it took less than a year to make the vaccines, a pace that was not easy to see before. It is also genetically safe – mRNAs cannot return to the nucleus and inadvertently insert genes into our DNA.
Researchers since the 1970s have discovered that you can use this method to fight all kinds of lawsuits. But as usual in science, you need huge sums of money, time and patience to solve all the intermediate problems. After a decade of commitment, mRNA became academically unfashionable in the 1990s. Progress seemed to be halting. The main obstacle was that injecting mRNA into animals often caused lethal inflammation.
Enter Katalin Kariko – a Hungarian scientist who entered the U.S. in the 1980s and has devoted her entire career to mRNA, through the ups and downs. In the 1990s, she lost her funding, was reduced, her salary was cut and she suffered other problems. But she grabbed him. And then, after fighting cancer herself, she made great progress.
In the 2000s, she and her research partner realized that eliminating uridine, one of the “letters” of mRNA, avoided inflammation without damaging the code. The mice survived.
Her study was read by Stanford University scientist Derrick Rossi, who later co-founded Moderna. It came to the attention of Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, two oncologists who are husband and wife and co-founder of BioNTech. They gave Kariko technology permission and hired it. From the beginning, they were very interested in curing cancer.
Today’s weapons against cancer look one day as primitive as flint axes in a operating room. To kill a malignant tumor, you usually zap it with radiation or chemicals, damaging a lot of other material in the process.
The best way to fight cancer, Sahin and Tureci realized, is to treat each tumor as genetically unique and train the immune systems of individual patients against that particular enemy. Perfect work for mRNA. You find the antigen, find its fingerprints, reframe the cell direction to target the culprit and allow the body to do the rest.
Check out the pipes at Moderna and BioNTech. They include drug tests for the treatment of cancers of the breast, prostate, skin, pancreas, brain, lungs and other tissues, as well as vaccines against everything from flu to Zika. and rabies. Expectations seem to be good.
Progress, it must be acknowledged, has been slow. Part of the explanation given by Sahin and Tureci is that investors in this sector have to set up capital oodles and then wait for more than a decade, first for the trials, then for regulatory approval. In the past, there were too few of them in the mood.
Covid-19, crossed fingers, may attack all of these processes. Pandemics have led to the extreme south of mRNA vaccines and the definitive confirmation of the concept. Already, there are murderers about the Nobel Prize for Kariko. So far, mRNAs will have no trouble getting money, attention or commitment – from investors, regulators and policy makers.
That doesn’t mean the last piece will be easy. But in this dark hour, it is permissible to die in the breaking light.
Bloomberg