Engineering, April 18 2021.
On 24 February 2021, a month after announcing the project, the biotechnology company Moderna (Cambridge, MA, USA) sent samples to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the updated coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine booster it had created and manufactured to address the B.1.351 variant of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), first reported in South Africa [1]. The hope is that such quick updates to authorized vaccines will provide—if and as needed—protection against the rapidly spreading new strains of SARS-CoV-2 that have shown troubling signs suggesting immune evasion [2].
These vaccines and boosters highlight the unique advantages of the new, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)-based vaccine development platform. Both Moderna and the partnership of Pfizer (New York City, NY, USA) and BioNTech (Mainz, Germany) tapped this novel technology to create and deliver COVID-19 vaccines in an unprecedented matter of months—in contrast to the typical timetable of years [3]. Now, the technology’s speed and flexibility may prove doubly valuable by helping to meet the challenge of a swiftly evolving virus. Read More >