mRNA technology has the potential to combat infectious diseases, cancer, and rare genetic diseases by harnessing the body’s natural protein-making machinery.
On March 13, 2020, President Trump declared the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic to be a national emergency. Just over three years later, in April 2023, President Biden declared the emergency over. A critical step in responding to the emergency was the development of several vaccines to guard against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes COVID-19. In December 2020, two vaccines, one by Pfizer- BioNTech and the other from Moderna, were authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both were vaccines using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which is a different mechanism of action from previously developed and available vaccines.
The speed with which these vaccines were developed and distributed highlighted some of the advantages of mRNA technology. Between mid-December 2020 and mid-June 2021, almost 299 million mRNA COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered in the United States: roughly 167 million of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 132 million of the Moderna vaccine.
Although this type of vaccine technology was new to the general public, the technology underlying the mRNA platform had been in development for decades. Its potential applications are far broader than simply vaccinating against COVID-19; this technology offers hope for combating many infectious diseases (in both humans and animals), fighting cancer, and treating rare genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. With the private sector now investing billions of dollars into further development of this technology, more breakthroughs can be anticipated.
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