Under Development

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead: mRNA technology has been under development for use in vaccines for quite some time now, Elizabeth Tracey reports

What makes an mRNA platform, currently in use in both Sars-CoV2 vaccines being administered in the US, so attractive? Andrew Pekosz, a vaccine expert at Johns Hopkins, says abundant research experience utilizing this technology for a variety of infectious diseases enabled researchers to move quickly.

Pekosz: People say that they’re a little bit concerned about this being a new platform but we should point out that there have been an awful lot of phase 1 clinical trials using mRNA vaccines for a host of different emerging infectious diseases. So there’s actually a good base of clinical studies that were used to guide everything that happened this year with the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines.  :23

Pekosz believes many types of vaccines, most especially the flu vaccine, will soon be made using this platform, which may enable the development of a flu vaccine that would only have to be administered once every few years rather than yearly as we do now. He is also confident that if a new strain of Sars-CoV2 emerges a vaccine can be developed fast using mRNA technology. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.