The Science Technology and Ethics of HIV - amazonia.fiocruz.br

The Science Technology and Ethics of HIV Video

The vaccines, icy concoctions of fatty spheres and genetic instructionsused a previously unproven technology based on messenger RNA and had been built and tested in under a year, thanks to discoveries the pair made starting 20 years earlier. In the silent promotional clip, neither one speaks or smiles as a nurse inserts the hypodermic into their arms. I later asked Weissman, who has been a physician and working scientist sincewhat he was thinking in that moment. Beyond potentially ending the pandemic, the vaccine breakthrough is showing how messenger RNA may offer a new approach to building drugs.

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In the near future, researchers believe, shots that deliver temporary instructions into cells could lead to vaccines against herpes and malaria, better flu vaccines, and, if the covid germ keeps mutating, updated coronavirus vaccinations, too. But researchers also see a future well beyond vaccines.

They think the technology will permit cheap gene fixes for cancer, sickle-cell disease, and maybe even HIV. Despite those two decades of research, though, messenger RNA had never been used in any marketed drug before last year. Then, in Decemberthe first reports emerged from Wuhan, China, about a scary transmissible pneumonia, most likely some kind of bat virus. The virus was already moving quickly, jumping onto airplanes and popping up in Hong Kong and Thailand. But the genetic information moved The Science Technology and Ethics of HIV faster.

Scientists at Moderna, a biotech specializing in messenger RNA, were able to design a vaccine on paper in 48 hours, 11 days before the US even had its first recorded click. Inside of six weeks, Moderna had chilled doses ready for tests in animals. Moderna had promised to make up to a billion doses during Imagine, he said, that Henry Ford was rolling the first Model T off the production line, only to be told the world needed a billion of them. The first attempt to use synthetic messenger RNA to make an animal produce a protein was in It worked but a big problem soon arose. The injections made mice sick.

The culprit was inflammation. Over a few billion years, bacteria, plants, and mammals have all evolved to spot the genetic material from viruses and react to it. As amd found, cells are packed with sensing molecules that distinguish your RNA from that of a virus. If these molecules see viral genes, they launch a storm of immune molecules called cytokines that hold the virus at bay while your body learns to cope with it. But too strong a flood of cytokines can kill you.

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Etyics eureka moment was when the two scientists determined they could avoid the immune reaction by using chemically modified building blocks to make the RNA. It worked. Vaccines were not their focus. If so, the company could easily name 20, 30, or even 40 drugs that would be worth replacing. But Moderna was struggling with how to get the messenger RNA to the right cells in the body, and without too many side effects.]