An optimized mRNA vaccine against COVID-19

For non-replicating mRNA vaccines currently used by BioNTech, CureVac and Moderna in phase III trials, the amount of mRNA per injection is between 12 and 100 g. Should 100 g be needed, vaccinating the whole Swiss population would require 2 kg of purified mRNA, i.e. at least 400 litres of transcription reaction mixture. This cannot be achieved easily and quickly because it requires expensive infrastructures and large amounts of raw materials. Self-amplifying mRNA requires much lower amounts of material than non-replicating mRNA.

We aim to generate an optimal and safe self-amplifying mRNA vaccine for subcutaneous, intramuscular or intranasal administration that induces a strong antibody response against SARS-CoV-2. The amounts of mRNA could be a thousand-fold lower than the amounts required for the current non-replicating mRNA vaccines.

We expect to identify a formulation of an mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 that will induce a strong antibody response after an injection of a very small amout of vaccine mRNA, in the range of one nanogram mRNA per mouse. The outcome will be a safe, efficacious, versatile and inexpensive mRNA vaccine against coronavirus that can also form the basis for easily and quickly manufactured vaccines against any new viral diseases.

Our work will provide a method for designing and producing an mRNA vaccine that can induce strong antibody responses against the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a minimum amount of injected mRNA. Using this method, we predict that we could vaccinate the whole Swiss population with just 5 grams of spike-coding mRNA. This amount of mRNA could easily be produced within a small GMP certified infrastructure using small amounts of reagents (e.g. nucleotides and enzymes).

Optimierter mRNA-Impfstoff für die COVID-19-Prophylaxe

https://www.cancer.uzh.ch/en/Research/mRNA-Platform.html