Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
mRNA Technology Gave Us the First COVID-19 Vaccines. It Could Also Upend the Drug Industry
How mRNA Technology Could Upend the Drug Industry
Inside the remarkable scientific discoveries behind the new COVID-19 vaccines
time.com
Up until last year, vaccines had not changed very much, at least in concept, for more than two centuries. Most have been modeled on the discovery made in 1796 by the English doctor Edward Jenner, who noticed that many milkmaids were immune to smallpox. They had all been infected by a form of pox that afflicts cows but is relatively harmless to humans, and Jenner surmised that the cowpox had given them immunity to smallpox. So he took some pus from a cowpox blister, rubbed it into scratches he made in the arm of his gardener’s 8-year-old son and then (this was in the days before bioethics panels) exposed the kid to smallpox. He didn’t become ill.
Before then, inoculations were done by giving patients a small dose of the actual smallpox virus, hoping that they would get a mild case and then be immune. Jenner’s great advance was to use a related but relatively harmless virus. Ever since, vaccinations have been based on the idea of exposing a patient to a safe facsimile of a dangerous virus or other germ. This is intended to kick the person’s adaptive immune system into gear. When it works, the body produces antibodies that will, sometimes for many years, fend off any infection if the real germ attacks.