Technology used in COVID-19 vaccines has been around for decades

The mRNA technology used to create the two COVID-19 vaccines approved for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration may seem new but it has a decades-long history with scientists. Unlike flu vaccines that use inactivated virus to create an immune response, COVID-19 vaccines created by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna use mRNA technology, or messenger RNA, a process that teaches our cells how to make a protein, or a piece of a protein, to trigger an immune response.

“It’s important to understand how mRNA vaccines work because there’s a lot of misinformation and misperceptions about vaccines,” said Robert A. Barrington, Ph.D., associate professor in the USA College of Medicine Department of Microbiology & Immunology.

The immune response created by an mRNA vaccine, which includes making antibodies, protects us from getting infected if we come in contact with the real virus, he said.

Scientists have been studying and working with mRNA technology for decades because it can be developed in a lab using readily available materials. That means the process can be standardized, making vaccine development faster and often less expensive than traditional methods, Barrington said.

In the past, mRNA vaccines have been studied for influenza, Zika and rabies.

The potential advantage with mRNA vaccines, Barrington said, is you can activate antibody response against the protein and you can also activate a cell mediated immune response, also called a T-cell response.

“When you have those two working together,” he said, “you have more complete protection against viral infections.”

While some have expressed concerns that mRNA will change their genetic makeup, Barrington said that’s not possible. “The mRNA vaccine does not enter the nucleus in our cells, where our DNA is located, and therefore does not affect our genetic makeup,” he said. “The vaccine does allow us to produce a foreign protein, or piece of the protein (SARS-CoV2 spike to be exact), that will elicit the immune response without changing our genomic DNA.”

It’s also vital to note that conventional vaccines like those used to battle influenza, as well as mRNA vaccines, will not cause disease, Barrington said.

Barrington has signed up to receive the new vaccine: “The latest research shows 1 in 23 people will be exposed to COVID-19 and as many as 1 in 200 will be hospitalized,” he said. “I’m not interested in being one of those statistics. I want to be protected.”