Extraordinary times need extraordinary solutions. The SARS-CoV2 pandemic has caused global health and economic devastation. But humanity is fighting back. It is an incredible effort of humankind to create vaccines in less than a year.
But not only have we been able to create vaccines, we have created them in ways never before seen. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is the first ever mRNA vaccine, where your own ribosomes do the hard work of creating the antigen. But how does it work?
Software developer, physicist, and entrepreneur Bert Hubert from the Netherlands (@PowerDNS-Bert) wrote a superb article where he reverse engineered the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine (available in a variety of languages here. Each of the six critical parts of the vaccine is discussed: the starting cap, the ribosome “landing strip”, the signal section which gives the final protein a destination, the code for the spike protein, the finish section, and the number of repeats code.
The vaccine is a lipid encapsulated string of mRNA. But the human body is often exposed to foreign DNA and RNA, which is rapidly broken down. How did the vaccine developers trick us to be able to accept their mRNA? How did they make it the protein fold the correct way? How many mRNA strands are there, and how many time is each one used? What are the positive, and negative implications for the future?
Thanks also to @disasteradio for the unique music to play us out.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download