COVID-19 has changed the world for everyone. This worldwide pandemic has been one of the worst, deadliest disease outbreaks of history, yet modern technologies have allowed us to persevere and due to the groundbreaking vaccine technology, we have begun overcoming this pandemic far quicker than ever done before. The majority of the vaccines that are circulating are those of Moderna and Pfizer and they use new revolutionary messenger RNA technology. But what is this technology exactly?

While mRNA technology seems to be a new discovery, it has been studied and observed for the past decade. Before this technology existed, it was believed that bacterial infections were the only type of disease for which a vaccine or cure could be developed, and for viral infection and many hereditary diseases, only the symptoms could be treated. But scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman came up with the soon-to-be revolutionary messenger RNA technology that would possibly debunk this presumed statement. Karikó and Weissman first used the technology in 1990 and injected it in mice to try and get them to produce a certain protein. However, when the drug was injected into the mice, the mice had fatal consequences. If given a large dose the mice would die within a few hours. This experiment proved that mRNA technology would not be viable. The problem was that many organisms have developed a way to detect foreign genetic material and defend themselves against it. To overcome these issues, Weissman and Karikó first had to identify how the cells were able to identify foreign genetic material. They discovered that inside the cells there are molecules that can sense and separate your genetic information from that of an outside source such as a virus. Once an external genetic material is detected, the cell launches a series of immune system responses to eradicate it or prevent it from hijacking the cell while the body develops an antibody reaction. Weissman and Karikó realized that the only way to prevent these immune responses from attacking the mRNA technology was to genetically engineer the RNA and change the chemical composition of the nucleotides which are the building blocks of the nucleic acid. After much trial and error, it finally worked, and not soon after a group of entrepreneurs from Cambridge established the company Moderna to further analyze and utilize Weissman and Karikó’s research. Although the company was established in 2010, it took several years for them to design the mRNA in such a manner that it reached only the desired cells and had minimal side effects. They were able to resolve this issue, but they were struggling with having to give multiple doses, as each dose proved to be less and less effective. The technology was not tested in vaccines originally, but soon was implemented in vaccine form when Moderna realized that by using this tech in vaccines they could inject only one dose yet still be enough for the immune system to learn to develop antibodies. 

How is this vaccine technology being implemented in the COVID vaccine? Unlike traditional vaccines that use live viruses or dead ones, these vaccines use mRNA which are nucleic acids that then guide the cells to make the necessary proteins to fight off the disease. The message that is being conveyed is for making a protein that is on the COVID virus known as the spike. The spike is used by the virus to enter cells, but the protein cannot harm or cause covid itself. By providing cells with this protein, the cells can easily develop an immune response to it using the genetic guidance of the mRNA. When this is happening the body may experience some side effects. Studies showed that the vaccine prevented 95% of covid-19 cases. Since the technology was already explored, it took little time for Moderna to develop the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine was designed in 48 hours, 11 days before the first COVID case even arrived in the United States! Unfortunately, since this technology had never been used before there were no manufacturers who could create and distribute the vaccine, so it took a while for the vaccines to get distributed, but we persevered through this hardship quickly through the help of the World Health Organization and other governments. At around the same time that Moderna developed a mRNA vaccine, Pfizer-BioNTech created a nearly identical vaccine, also speeding up the distribution and manufacturing process. The longest process of getting the vaccines out, however, was not the distribution part, but the testing and approval. The vaccine had to go through several phases of testing before it was approved, and individual government agencies then look at the tested vaccine and decide if it is safe to administer to the public.

The mRNA vaccine technology is likely to be the future of pharmaceuticals. There are so many potential uses for this tech. When it was originally developed, the creators hoped that it could be used to make a cure for HIV, but it goes much further than that. This technology can be used to finally provide a cure for all kinds of diseases that were previously believed to be incurable from herpes and other STIs to malaria and sickle-cell diseases. Not only does this technology have the potential to create cures that were never there before, but it could also provide us with better flu vaccines and vaccines to protect us against COVID mutations. However, it will be some time before these possibilities can become reality as it takes a while for scientists to engineer the technology in such a way that it delivers a sufficient amount of mRNA to the correct places in the body. And for diseases that are hereditary such as sickle-cell disease will be even more difficult to create cures for as it would require the mRNA technology to partner up with ground-breaking CRISPR technology to make permanent genetic changes. But scientists are already starting to come up with ways to incorporate mRNA vaccine technology. For example, for HIV, Weissman has already begun researching and collaborating with other scientists to test if T cells in monkeys can be engineered to attack HIV. Similarly, with sickle-cell disease, scientists are exploring ways to administer the mRNA instructions into the circulatory system to cure it once and for all. Nonetheless, mRNA technology has proven to be inevitable in our future as it provides a method to genetically modify a person’s genome at an immensely large scale.