How mRNA and DNA vaccines could soon treat cancers, HIV, autoimmune disorders and genetic diseases - The Conversation US

She also serves as a scientific advisor for HDT Bio, a biotechnology company developing RNA vaccines for COVID19 and other infectious diseases; scientific advisor for Abacus, Inc., a biotechnology company developing cancer vaccines and scientific advisor for SQZ Biotech, a biotechnology company developing cell-based therapies for cancer and infectious diseases.

Researchers solved a lot of the problems – notably the instability – and discovered new technologies to deliver mRNA into cells and ways of modifying the coding sequence to make the vaccines a lot more safe to use in humans.

With an mRNA or DNA vaccine, the goal is to make your body better able to recognize the very specific neoantigens the cancer cell has produced.

If your immune system can recognize and see those better, it will attack the cancer cells and eliminate them from the body.

Similar to the way nucleic acid vaccines can train the immune system to eliminate cancer cells, they can be used to train our immune cells to recognize and eliminate chronically infected cells.

Autoimmune disorders occur when a person’s immune cells are actually attacking a part of the person’s own body.

If you have multiple sclerosis, your own immune cells are attacking myelin, a protein that coats the nerve cells in your muscles.

The way to eliminate an autoimmune disorder is to modulate your immune cells to prevent them from attacking your own proteins.

In contrast to vaccines, whose goal is to stimulate the immune system to better recognize something, treatment for autoimmune diseases seeks to dampen the immune system so that it stops attacking something it shouldn’t.

Recently, researchers created an mRNA vaccine encoding a myelin protein with slightly tweaked genetic instructions to prevent it from stimulating immune responses.

Instead of activating normal T cells that increase immune responses, the vaccine caused the body to produce T regulatory cells that specifically suppressed only the T cells that were attacking myelin.