COVID-19 Vaccines Yield Breakthroughs in Long-Term Fight Against Infectious Disease

The Wall Street Journal reports that the pandemic has driven new milestones for gene-based vaccine design, suggesting future protection against a broad spectrum of infectious disease. Johnson & Johnson's (J&J's) COVID-19 vaccine, just authorized for use in the United States, is on the front line of a class of shots designed to rally the immune system against the virus. It will be the first U.S.-administered COVID-19 vaccine to use viral-vector technology, which employs an engineered cold virus to shuttle coronavirus-fighting genetic code to cells. COVID-19 viral-vector vaccines are produced by engineering a harmless version of a virus to ferry a gene from the coronavirus into the cell. "The beauty is that you use natural systems, which are optimized by millions of years of evolution, to deliver what you want to have your body respond to," said Vincent Munster at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Ahead of J&J's breakthrough were RNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, borne from years-long efforts to use fatty particles to deliver synthesized genetic code to cells.