Abstract
In recent years, vaccine development using ribonucleic acid (RNA) has become the most promising and studied approach to produce safe and effective new vaccines, not only for prophylaxis but also as a treatment. The use of messenger RNA (mRNA) as an immunogenic has several advantages to vaccine development compared to other platforms, such as lower coast, the absence of cell cultures, and the possibility to combine different targets. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of mRNA as a vaccine became more relevant; two out of the four most widely applied vaccines against COVID-19 in the world are based on this platform. However, even though it presents advantages for vaccine application, mRNA technology faces several pivotal challenges to improve mRNA stability, delivery, and the potential to generate the related protein needed to induce a humoral- and T-cell-mediated immune response. The application of mRNA to vaccine development emerged as a powerful tool to fight against cancer and non-infectious and infectious diseases, for example, and represents a relevant research field for future decades. Based on these advantages, this review emphasizes mRNA and self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) for vaccine development, mainly to fight against COVID-19, together with the challenges related to this approach.
Highlights
Vaccines are considered one of the most effective strategies to prevent, control, and eliminate infectious diseases [1,2]
MRNA vaccines were in the spotlight during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to note that much work has already been completed by using this technology platform in the treatment and prophylaxis of non-infectious diseases
This evidence may have motivated the developers of the ARCoV vaccine to use the receptorbinding domain (RBD) subunit of the SARS-CoV-2 S-protein as an antigen, which has been the region of the S-protein that has major neutralizing epitopes capable of inducing high titers of neutralizing antibodies and low levels of non-neutralizing antibodies when compared to the full-length S-protein [17,257,258]
Summary
Vaccines are considered one of the most effective strategies to prevent, control, and eliminate infectious diseases [1,2]. Several other advantages, such as scalability, flexibility in manipulating antigens of interest, and the induction of both cellular and humoral immunity [31,37], are inherent to RNA vaccines These characteristics previously enabled RNA-based vaccines to be evaluated against non-infectious diseases such as cancer and allowed their manufacturers to rapidly respond to emerging infectious agents such as SARS-CoV-2 [38]. For this reason, RNAbased vaccines have become attractive in the pandemic situation. Considering the potential presented by RNA-based vaccines, in this review, we provide a brief history and Vaccines 2021, 9, 1345 evaluate RNA-based vaccines within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, describing the prospects and challenges related to their use for immunization of large populations against SARS-CoV-2
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