A Comparison of Plasmid DNA and mRNA as Vaccine Technologies

Liu, Margaret A.

Plasmid DNA [1] and now mRNA [2] vaccines have generated significant interest and efforts because of their potential as platform technologies that could be used for a variety of applications ranging from prophylaxis to therapy and from personalized medicine to global health solutions. Both can be quickly made with fairly generic manufacturing processes and can be constructed directly from the genetic sequence of the desired protein, whether the origin of the protein is human or from a pathogen. For vaccines, making a gene construct coding for the antigen instead of inactivating or attenuating the pathogen, or instead of making a recombinant protein, is vastly easier, more rapid, and avoids potential risks of working with live pathogens. Likewise, the vaccine construct can encode only the key antigen without including other proteins that may be either deleterious (such as toxins) or that may be irrelevant for protection yet immunodominant.