This post had strong contributions from Lawrence Chiou, a graduate student in Biophysics at Stanford. Both the Moderna and Pfizer Covid vaccines are mRNA-based vaccines mRNA vaccines let your body produce viral proteins (but not the viruses themselves) that teach your immune system to recognize the same proteins in real viruses.
Love this writeup - very helpful! One question I had - is it generally an "easy" process to figure out which viral protein (the Spike protein in this case) to encode for?
Will the mRNA-based vaccines work in animals? Besides bats, mink, and domesticated cats and dogs, here's the latest species to be diagnosed with COVID19:
Love this writeup - very helpful! One question I had - is it generally an "easy" process to figure out which viral protein (the Spike protein in this case) to encode for?
Thank you for these 'take-away' articles.
Will the mRNA-based vaccines work in animals? Besides bats, mink, and domesticated cats and dogs, here's the latest species to be diagnosed with COVID19:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/science/covid-snow-leopards.html
Curious about this issue given that cross-species transmission started this whole pandemic.
Many thanks - Melanie