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The effectiveness of these vaccines, developed in record time, is raising great hopes around the world.
LThe American-German alliance Pfizer / BioNTech and then the American company Moderna recently claimed to have obtained very conclusive first results regarding their coronavirus vaccines.
Both stressed that they had found the martingale to fight Covid-19, with vaccines that would be 95% and 94.5% effective respectively. Never has a vaccine been developed so quickly in the face of such a recent disease.
Their clinical trials are currently in phase 3, in other words the last step before commercialization. The two companies plan to produce 50 million doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.
The effectiveness of these vaccines, developed in record time, is raising great hopes around the world, as many populations, especially in the United States and Europe, are facing a second wave of the virus.
These two vaccines have one thing in common: they are based on the same technology, called “messenger RNA” (mRNA), which has been in development since the 1970s under the guidance of Hungarian-born researcher Katalin Karikó.
All vaccines have the same goal: to train our immune system to recognize the coronavirus, to increase its defenses in a preventive way in order to neutralize the real virus should it infect us.
Usually, conventional vaccines, such as influenza, are made from inactivated and attenuated pieces of virus or proteins of this virus, which activate an immune response, which will lead to the production of specific antibodies. , which can protect the person when infected with the virus.
With Moderna and BioNTech / Pfizer vaccines, “We are not injecting a Sars-CoV-2 protein, but a message that will direct the synthesis of one of its proteins in the body”, explained Bertrand Séraphin, director of research at the CNRS Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Genetics (IGBMC), cited by France 24.
In fact, messenger RNA is a vector that carries information to cells to tell them which protein to produce.
In the body, “Each gene will produce a different messenger RNA for a specific protein. This is the central dogma of molecular biology “, added this specialist. This technology has a significant advantage: vaccines are faster to develop.
And for good reason: they don’t require culturing pathogens in the lab, as it’s the organism that does the work. This type of vaccine can therefore be produced easily and in large quantities. Downside? They must be stored at very low temperatures, i.e. -70 ° C, unlike conventional vaccines, which must be conditioned at -20 ° C.
However, questions about this vaccine remain unanswered, especially about how long it will be effective: “Immunity may disappear faster than with other vaccines, we don’t have hindsight about this technology”, indicated on FranceInfo Etienne Simon-Lorière, head of the RNA virus evolutionary genomics unit at the Institut Pasteur.
In an interview with Swiss Radio and Television, the head of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, reassured the concerned. “Messenger RNA technology is very interesting (…). It does not touch the cell nucleus, which is very important in order not to take risks with your DNA “, estimated Stéphane Bancel.
Even messenger RNA therapies are not limited to fighting viruses like Covid-19. They can be useful “When it is necessary to produce antibodies to fight diseased cells”, said Bertrand Séraphin.
“A cancer cell is usually different from others with different proteins on its surface. We can imagine mRNA-based vaccines that stimulate the immune response against these specific proteins to destroy cancer cells more effectively. “, explained the French scientist.
Moderna has been developing messenger RNA vaccines for years against Zika, influenza, Epstein-Barr virus (mononucleosis), respiratory syncytial virus (bronchiolitis, etc.), Cytomegalovirus (often not serious but which can represent a risk in patients with fetus), but also against tumors.
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