DNA Waccine Technolo: Biotechnology's Brave New World

摘要

Picture rows and rows of chicken eggs incubating not to hatch chickens, but to produce vaccines. With the exception of a few products on the market now, most vaccines are still made using this 50-year-old technology. Using chicken eggs to produce vaccines takes about half a year to complete and requires on average one to two eggs to make a single vaccine dose. It is inefficient, labor intensive, time consuming, and subject to contamination. The latter may be the most important problem. In addition tothe vaccine you want, contaminants (including other viruses) can get into the product stream. But there may be a way to modernize our vaccine technology. Rather than producing a virus or a protein to inject into an organism, we can produce a sequence ofDNA that has been genetically engineered to express proteins from a specific pathogen when introduced into an organism. The idea is that once the organism's cells have made the proteins from that DNA sequence, the immune system will recognize them as foreign and launch a response against them.