But I’ve been hearing that the Moderna vaccine was designed in two days, which strongly suggests that it’s simple.
The word designed doesn’t mean the same as produce. Here it just means deciding for the RNA sequence and that’s not a big issue. The sequence for the spike protein is well known and it’s basically about chosing a sequence for the spike protein while following a few heuristics about choosing coding that’s robust and easily read so that you get a lot of protein production in the cell.
Moderna took 25 days to actually produce their first clinical batch.
Previously they spend 10 years developing know how about how to build the RNA delivery platform.
The fact that CureVac didn’t manage to get a vaccine candidate as soon as Moderna/Biontic illustrates that the mRNA vaccine producing step is highly nontrivial.
On the other hand, there are simpler methods to produce vaccines like the one persued by RaDVaC.
The word designed doesn’t mean the same as produce. Here it just means deciding for the RNA sequence and that’s not a big issue. The sequence for the spike protein is well known and it’s basically about chosing a sequence for the spike protein while following a few heuristics about choosing coding that’s robust and easily read so that you get a lot of protein production in the cell.
Moderna took 25 days to actually produce their first clinical batch.
Previously they spend 10 years developing know how about how to build the RNA delivery platform.
The fact that CureVac didn’t manage to get a vaccine candidate as soon as Moderna/Biontic illustrates that the mRNA vaccine producing step is highly nontrivial.
On the other hand, there are simpler methods to produce vaccines like the one persued by RaDVaC.