A Comparison of Plasmid DNA and mRNA as Vaccine Technologies

Liu, Margaret A.

The ease and speed of making the constructs also means that these are considered potential gamechangers for targeting epidemic or emerging diseases where rapidly designing, constructing, and manufacturing the vaccine are crucial. For cancer, rather than relying on tumor-associated antigens that are common to many tumors, it would require little more effort to make the vaccines specific for that individual's exact tumor antigens, now referred to as personalized vaccines. The concept was demonstrated pre-clinically in the mid-1990s with DNA vaccines targeting lymphoma, where the idiotype of a tumor could be rapidly sequenced, and a DNA vaccine made much more quickly than a recombinant protein version [3, 4] . Alternatively, as is being tested now for mRNA [2, 5] , libraries of gene-based constructs encoding various antigens could be made. Then, based on a patient's individual tumor antigens, a combination of constructs could be easily combined from this pre-made library.