Biopharmaceutical Breakthroughs

Overview of COVID-19 Vaccines, Live Vaccine Vectors, Adjuvants, and Nucleic Acid and Cell-Based Therapies

• Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and CureVac COVID-19 vaccines code only for the viral spike protein and are non-amplifying.
• Polyplex and lipid nanoparticle vectors are used to protect mRNA from degradation by ribonucleases and facilitate cell targeting.
• The mRNA vaccines employ PEGylated LNPs as their delivery vehicle.
• The mechanism of action of mRNA vaccines involves in vitro transcription, transfection of dendritic cells, endosomal escape, translation into antigenic proteins, and stimulation of antigen-specific T-cell and humoral immune responses.
• Live vaccine vectors, both viral and bacterial, are an alternative approach to subunit or mRNA vaccines, with adenovirus and poxvirus vectors being most frequently used.
• Adjuvants enhance the immune response to an antigen and facilitate the administration of reduced quantities of antigen to achieve an adequate immunological response.
• Aluminium-based products are routinely used as adjuvants in human medicine due to safety reasons.
• An ideal adjuvant should be safe, effective in eliciting protective immunity, non-pyrogenic, chemically defined, effective in infants/young children, yield stable formulation with the antigen, biodegradable, and non-immunogenic itself.
• Nucleic acid-based therapies include gene therapy, antisense technology, RNAi, ribozymes, aptamers, and CRISPR genome editing technology.
• Only a handful of nucleic-acid based products had gained regulatory approval by the turn of the decade, including Gendicine, Glybera, Vitravene, Macugen, Kynamro, Eteplirsen, Defitelio, and Spinraza.
• Hundreds of protein-based biopharmaceuticals had been approved by early 2020.
• THPdb is a manually curated repository of FDA approved therapeutic proteins, providing comprehensive information on FDA approved therapeutic peptides, proteins, and their drug variants.

Test your knowledge about the latest COVID-19 vaccines and cutting-edge nucleic acid and cell-based therapies with this informative quiz. Learn about the different types of vaccines, their mechanisms of action, and how they are delivered to the body. Explore the world of live vaccine vectors, adjuvants, and nucleic acid-based therapies, and discover how they are used to combat diseases. Take this quiz and enhance your understanding of the latest developments in the field of biopharmaceuticals.