Were you and your colleagues thinking about vaccines when you studied viruses that caused cancer?Ī: Not RNA vaccines! There was a hope in the ’70s that viruses were the cause of many cancers and could possibly be treated by conventional vaccination with inactivated virus. Q: Professor Sharp, take us back to the fifth floor of the MIT Center for Cancer Research in the 1970s. Sharp, a professor within the Department of Biology and member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, commented on the long arc of scientific research that has led to this groundbreaking, rapid vaccine development - and looked ahead to what the future might hold for mRNA technology. Sharp’s discovery of split genes and spliced RNA that took place at MIT in the 1970s - a discovery that would earn him the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This success story begins with Institute Professor Phillip A. The fact that these vaccines could be rapidly developed within these last 10 months rests on more than four decades of study of mRNA. These vaccines appear to have a greater than 90 percent efficacy in protecting against infection.

Food and Drug Administration - a feat unheard of with traditional vaccines using live attenuated or inactive viruses. Within the year since the identification and sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, companies such as Pfizer and Moderna have developed mRNA vaccines and run large-scale trials in the race to have a vaccine approved by the U.S. The mRNA vaccines take advantage of this cellular process to make proteins that then trigger an immune response that targets SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.Ĭompared to other types of vaccines, recently developed technologies allow mRNA vaccines to be rapidly created and deployed on a large-scale - crucial aspects in the fight against Covid-19. Some of the most promising vaccines developed to combat Covid-19 rely on messenger RNA (mRNA) - a template cells use to carry genetic instructions for producing proteins.

Messenger rna vaccine