Stanford Scientists Reverse Engineer Moderna Vaccine, Post Code On Github (vice.com) 111
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Stanford scientists saved drops of the COVID-19 vaccine destined for the garbage can, reverse engineered them, and have posted the mRNA sequence that powers the vaccine on GitHub for all to see. The GitHub post is four pages long. The first two are an explanation by the team of scientists about the work, the second two pages are the entire mRNA sequence for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. "RNA vaccines have become a key tool in moving forward through the challenges raised both in the current pandemic and in numerous other public health and medical challenges," the scientists said on GitHub. "Despite their ubiquity, sequences are not always available for such RNA. Standard methods facilitate such sequencing."
According to Stanford scientists Andrew Fire and Massa Shoura, this isn't technically "reverse-engineering" a vaccine. "We didn't reverse engineer the vaccine. We posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021," they told Motherboard in an email. "As the vaccine has been rolling out, these sequences have begun to show up in many different investigational and diagnostic studies. Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets is of great utility." [...] According to Shoura and Fire, the FDA cleared the Stanford project's decision to share the sequence with the community. "We did contact Moderna a couple of weeks ago to indicate that we were hoping to include the sequence in a publication and asking if there was anything that we should reference with respect to this... no response or objection from them, so we assume that everyone is busy doing important work."
According to Stanford scientists Andrew Fire and Massa Shoura, this isn't technically "reverse-engineering" a vaccine. "We didn't reverse engineer the vaccine. We posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021," they told Motherboard in an email. "As the vaccine has been rolling out, these sequences have begun to show up in many different investigational and diagnostic studies. Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets is of great utility." [...] According to Shoura and Fire, the FDA cleared the Stanford project's decision to share the sequence with the community. "We did contact Moderna a couple of weeks ago to indicate that we were hoping to include the sequence in a publication and asking if there was anything that we should reference with respect to this... no response or objection from them, so we assume that everyone is busy doing important work."
Wuhan Lab Sues Stanford Scientists for infrigement (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: Wuhan Lab Sues Stanford Scientists for infrige (Score:1)
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How its either patented they have published how to produce the vaccine, or its a trade secret so not protected by patents.
Re: Wuhan Lab Sues Stanford Scientists for infrige (Score:2)
Given the US government (under Trump) paid for its development, I would say it should probably be public domain.
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of a sampling of vaccine approvals by the FDA between 2010 and 2020, the median approval time was 8 years.
do you actually think fauci deserves credit? do you believe biden deserves credit?
so, you're suggesting that the only thing that Trump administration did was gaurantee a market and essentially pre-pay for supply, and reduce regulation by the FDA for approval from 8 years to less than 1.
Yes, the private market did the heavy lifting. Of the public partners, only the trump administration really did anythi
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https://www.biospace.com/artic... [biospace.com]
"Operation Warp Speed’s stated goal is to ensure that 80% of the 330.7 million Americans get injections by late June. To do so, more than 3 million people would have to be jabbed each day. Currently, the U.S. is averaging about 200,000 people per day."
"President Trump lashed out on Twitter, passing the buck, tweeting that it is “up to the States
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"Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN on Feb. 16 that there had been a vaccine distribution plan but a “rather vague” plan on “getting the vaccine doses into people’s arms.”
“Getting the vaccines made, getting them shipped through Operation Warp Speed was okay,” Fauci said. “But I believe what the vice president is referring to is what is the process of actually getting these doses into people. That
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No, dingus, because it took months of testing to make sure they were ready. Pfizer SPECIFICALLY refused 'Operation Warp Speed' money to develop the vaccine, and they were the first ones out of the gate with something viable. BioNTech is a GERMAN company that partnered with Pfizer for scale, but the R&D for the actual vaccine had nothing to do with this Operation Warp Speed thing.
New commercial (Score:5, Funny)
You wouldn't download a vaccine or download a car. (Shots of hot young people printing pirated doses of vaccines and then partying, accompanied by awesome sounding music)
Re:New commercial (Score:5, Funny)
...followed by sheepish acknowledgement that the awesome-sounding music was used without permission from the rights holder
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You wouldn't download a baby!
You wouldn't shoot a policeman and then download his helmet!
You wouldn't shit in the policeman's helmet (Score:2)
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Lots of expert immunologists with nothing but time on their hands here on slashdot.
Summary: I don't have any reason to think you are anything but full of shit.
Moreover, supposing that you are correct, herd immunity still eliminates almost all the hosts for the virus to reach the most vulnerable through, protecting them.
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Of course the real underlying problem of mRNA vaccines, they are the most effective in those least at risk and the least effective in those most a risk, by the very nature of their design.
Citation needed.
But what about the tracking chip? (Score:3, Funny)
Did they reverse engineer the tracking chip that Bill Gates puts in the vaccine?
By the way, for those who are clueless, that was sarcasm.
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Did they reverse engineer the tracking chip that Bill Gates puts in the vaccine?
They are going to need a few more weeks. Borg nanotech is difficult to reverse engineer.
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By the way, for those who are clueless, that was sarcasm.
And here I was struggling to find just the right words for a modern sig...
LOL (Score:3)
You can click but you can't hide. /s
Grab a copy of the repo before it gets taken down.
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Grab a copy of the repo before it gets taken down.
Or goes bad. Github isn't stored in a sub-zero freezer ... :-)
Also, wouldn't this be better off stored in GitLab?
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Actually, it is... [slashdot.org]
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That's okay, I just bought the NFT for it. Safe as houses now ;-) /s
Vaccine Warez? (Score:3)
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The whole genome of the virus has been sequenced and publicly available for over a year now. Apparently it took Moderna only a few hours to choose the sequences it wanted to target, so there was nothing keeping bio hackers from developing their own *DNA* vaccines.
mRNA is a different kettle of fish. The problem with it for any kind of home hackers is that it is very unstable. If you think about what mRNA does, that makes sense. The cell produces mRNA in response to some kind of stimulus, and you don't wan
Re:Vaccine Warez? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's nothing to figure out this vaccine is easy to make at home. Ideally, though not required, you need a DNA printer (you can get a cheap oligo synthesizer on eBay anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 if you want the high end shit). If not, you can still make it for around $500. Of that $500, $300 is to order a strand of DNA with the vaccine code on it because you were too cheap to buy an oligo synthesizer. Then, you need something called a DNA dependent RNA polymerase, probably T7 polymerase works best. You can get it many places cheap, although you probably should have your credentials as a biohacker revoked if you don't have some lying around. You just mix the DNA strand and the T7 polymerase together .. and within an hour you have the mRNA for the vaccine. Then you encapsulate it by (essentially) mixing it in some lipids (which you can buy it cheap, my favorite supplier is Avanti Polar Lipids) and if you wanna be fancy you can add some PEG (poly-ethylene glycol). PEG costs so little that you have to buy a massive quantity at a time, what a ripoff. Oh yeah you might want to purify it some with an HPLC, though it might not kill you even without purification.
I simplified the steps a little bit, but it really is that easy. Of course, if you try to do it based on just the above and lacking experience you might die or worse.
My point is that this vaccine is easy to make, it's only a matter of doing it and not going to jail for giving it to somebody because you said F U to the FDA.
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Note, I just remembered I left out a critical step which is methylation of the RNA .. but that's easy.
Re:Vaccine Warez? (Score:4, Funny)
Note, I just remembered I left out a critical step which is methylation of the RNA .. but that's easy.
You sound a lot like my boss.
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This is how difficult the lipid choices alone are.
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceut... [acs.org]
I don't think Moderna and Pfizer are sharing their recipes so you'd have to repeat the decades of trial and error.
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The lipid pfizer uses is available commercially to anyone. Moderna's lipid formula and structure is known so it can be synthesized .. granted that it may take some trial and error. Also, that article is a bit of exaggeration, there are enough published works on lipids that are good enough. You may have to take a higher dose or something like that, you don't need it to be as great as Pfizers. All the lipid does is help it get into the cell. If you use one that doesn't work as good it means you need to take a
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I'll keep my CRISPR machine next to my fancy 3D printer and my top-notch copier!
I am a self-sufficient modern man!
Is this legal? (Score:1)
Re:Is this legal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm. If it were patented, they could have just copied it from the patent documents. So trade secret seems likely.
If California prohibits publishing material obtained by lawful means, I call that unjust.
Meanwhile it's already been done for the Pfizer vaccine. There's a teardown report at berthub.eu, written for the mindset of software people. The amount of thought and refinement in every detail of the mRNA sequence impressed me.
Re:Is this legal? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a teardown report at berthub.eu, written for the mindset of software people. The amount of thought and refinement in every detail of the mRNA sequence impressed me.
Yes, excellent overview of how that sequence of nucleotides actually works. https://berthub.eu/articles/po... [berthub.eu]
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Re: Is this legal? (Score:5, Informative)
There is zero trade secret whatsoever. It is just an mRNA expression backbone with the spike protein sequence. Good mRNA expression vectors are well known. The spike protein sequence is well known. They used a stabilized version published by University of Texas at Austin.
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Trade secrets are difficult for others to properly acquire or independently duplicate, subject to reasonable measures to guard the secrecy of the information, and not known outside of the particular business entity[source] [nolo.com]. Also Moderna has to show they were harmed by this being published, which seems unlikely.
Moderna apparently did nothing to guard the secrecy of this information, even when asked.
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I would assume these mRNA sequences are trade secrets. California has strict laws against revealing trade secrets, so these scientists can probably expect a major lawsuit.
Reverse engineering is not revealing a trade secret.
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Trade secret laws apply to your employees, contractors, and others who have specific business relationships with you. There's no problem with recreating a trade secret independently. That's the risk you take by making something a trade secret instead of a patent.
Le Epic Science Juice! (Score:1)
It's not the code that's Pfizer is protecting (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the mRNA code that Pfizer is protecting The code doesn't do that much for you. It's the mass manufacturing of the whole viable vaccine that is hard to do.
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Derek Lowe has written about how difficult the supply chain management alone is. Also you're dead right saying "whole viable vaccine", because the lipid carriers are critical and by all accounts a black art.
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Quite so, and I've been ranting to any ear I can grab that this moment is like the 1960s and early days of the integrated circuit.
The mRNA is a fantastic advance, and the BioNTech folks have been working on it for 10-15 years, with the goal of creating cancer vaccines. There are many other labs filled with fantastic developments. For any of them to have real-world impact, they must make the jump from million dollar per shot lab
The mRNA code was public anyway (Score:2)
It is the sequence from the virus that makes the spike protein.
There is a bit more to it. The leader and trailer, plus the way they changed some base pairs. But basically it is the Virus that owns the IP.
How they manufacture it, and stick it in a lipid capsule etc. That is amazing.
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Publishing this reverse engineered DNA sequence would be like reverse engineering and publishing the schematic for the new iPhone. Just because you know all the parts that go into it doesn't mean you can build an iPhone at home...
Eat your vitamins and say your prayers! (Score:1)
You got that right, brother! Coronamania is running wild!
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It's not just the mass manufacturing Moderna is protecting.
A raw mRNA sequence is pretty useless by itself - if injected, the spleen and immune system would just break down the mRNA as part of cleaning up the blood. Instead, you need to encapsulate the sequence inside a protein shell that a cell will accept (i.e., it has to "infect" the cell). At
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Right.. That's why I said "the mass manufacturing of the whole viable vaccine". So I don't know what you are arguing with me about.
But, even getting ALL that together to work, you still have to figure out how to make it in large enough quantities to sell. And THAT'S just to get it out the door. Then you have a whole host of other problems with shipping and distribution. AND then you still have jerks that have decided they won't take it.
Beware of the Leopard (Score:4, Funny)
From TFA:
Stanford folks: "We did contact Moderna a couple of weeks ago to indicate that we were hoping to include the sequence in a publication and asking if there was anything that we should reference with respect to this... no response or objection from them, so we assume that everyone is busy doing important work."
Moderna spokescritter: “Contact us? How? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find the inquiry.”
Stanford folks: “We assumed that was the response department.”
Moderna spokescritter: “I had to use a flashlight to find your inquiry.”
Stanford folks: “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
Moderna spokescritter: “So had the stairs.”
Stanford folks: “But look, you found the notification, didn’t you?”
Moderna Spokescritter: “Yes, we did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
source code for BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine (Score:2)
https://mednet-communities.net/inn/db/media/docs/11889.doc [mednet-communities.net]
Health must not be privatized. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, it's the evil evil for-profit corporations that are doing the leg-work in manufacturing everything from the vaccines to the vials to the refrigerators to the needles used to inject them. And where non-profit entities do make an appearance, it's generally in the context of governments and government agencies fucking up spectacularly, like CDC repeatedly failing to field a covid test last year and FDA and CMS actively ordering private labs to refrain from testing at the early phases of the outbreak.
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i find it curious that you seem to believe that health-care is a right. anything that involves the labor of others is necessarily not a right. It's the moral thing to do to help one another, but you no more deserve a cheap pill, than you deserve to have a harem.
innovation is driven by greed, desperation and curiosity.
lets talk about a hypothetical drug for a hypothetical disease. lets exclude the people that will research the drug for passion/altruism. They'll do it regardless of private vs public. The
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:3)
We have an example of how that would work. You can read about it in the news right now. It isn't working very well where it is being tried. In the places where it is working well, it's the private sector enabling it.
Communists don't care about results. They care about ideological purity. That's why they tell me with a straight face that Venezuela is in good shape, Cuba is a paradise, thr Soviet Union failed becaue it was too capitalist, and that private-sector covid vaccinations in the US and UK work worse
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:3)
We've known for centuries that the promise of profits enables greater human well-being by harnessing human greed instead of trying to deny its existance and efficacy as a motivator and organizer. This baloney about greed tainting results is just ideological posturing that when put into practices creates great human suffering in the name of moral purity.
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:2)
Yeah...Communists do like to talk about human wellbeing and summary executions in the same breath. Keep up to good work, comrade.
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:2)
I lived a portion of my life under Soviet Communism and many of my family members lived a good portion of their adult lives under Soviet or Chinese Communism. I am familiar with life under deprivation.
I am also familiar with how obscenely generous the American social safety net is to people who have never paid a cent in taxes here and yet get world-class medical care for free.
I am also quite familiar with the concept of scarcity: scarcity of medical supplies, scarcity of manufacturing capacity to produce th
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:2)
People don't work for free and they won't start because you think they should. The American system works fine for almost everyone. Socialist alternatives that eradicate any hint of profits in a religious crusade against greed don't work very well.
Your reading comprehension could use some work if your only response to witness testimony that the American medical system works fine even for the poor and that Communist systems work equally poorly for everyone is to fantasize about committing violence against me
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:2)
All the countries you listed happen to be doing worse than the US on the metric that commands the most attention today: share of population fully vaccinated against covid.
You're also repeating propaganda about punishing the poor etc etc. The US medical system does not do that. The social safety net is very generous as is. You don't have to have worked a day in your life in this country but you're still eligible for all sorts of free stuff.
And btw: you keep talking about what should and shouldn't be allowed.
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:2)
You are seeing harm where it doesn't objectively exist and advocating violence against people who don't share your delusion. Get out more and meet people. After getting your shot. And maybe the rest of your meds.
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:2)
My grandparents never worked a day in their lives in this country, never paid a cent in taxes, and got full health coverage at no cost to them.
My wife works at a hospital that treats a large fraction of patients with zero means to pay their own way, and they get treated. Young people from third world countries get on planes to come here because they know they'll get free medical care.
Cite all the statistics you want, but I have seen with my own eyes that medical care is essentially free to people with no me
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:2)
"Health care" doesn't exist without people to provide it to you. Those people don't work for free and they don't owe you or anyone else jack shit.
Saying "health care is a right" is like saying "gasoline is a right" or "flush toilets are a right." None of them exist without the hard work of highly trained people who have the right to the fruits of their own labor and don't owe you or anyone else free stuff.
Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:2)
I read your links. It's rage bait with little grounding in present-day reality. Like I said, I can point to real people whom I know who get healthcare for free using established well-publicized social safety net programs, not some secret squirrel handshakes.
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Re: Health must not be privatized. (Score:2)
Not like here. That's why they come here from there and why we make them go through residency and fellowship training so they don't flood the zone with cheap labor and undercut the American medical training pipeline.
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i assume from your post, that you live an ascetic life, and that you give away all your profits except for what you need to live right now right this instant. if not, you're a hypocrite.
I'm pretty sure they're pissed off (Score:3)
That's one example, but most of these vaccines were developed with lots of money and assistance from governments and State Universities and are now being sold back to us for a hefty profit.
Poor timing (Score:4, Funny)
Need version control for RNA & DNA, not GitHub (Score:2)
So, how about it?
Version control for RNA & DNA?
And, a comparison method. After al
I hope someone make x64 version of this (Score:2)
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You need one of these [kilobaser.com].
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70% of my thesis was spent making oligonucleotides, 5% was doing the actual work and discovering, and 25% was writing everything down. There's now a machine cheaper than most cars that can do all that for you!? We really are living in the future!
I'd almost be pissed if my degree served a purpose other than covering up the ugly spot on the wallpaper.
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Microbiology is making amazing advances, it's a good field to be in.
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um, from what i understand, it runs on meatware... and you should come with the compiler preinstalled. try loading it into a different port, that might work.
Identical Protein, different mRNAs (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks to redundancy in the genetic code [wikipedia.org], multiple RNA triplets can often encode the same amino acid. The random nature of codon optimization algorithms would lead to the two teams choosing "different' mRNAs that still reflect the codon usage stats of a human mRNA.
There are also notable differences in the 5' (upstream) and 3' (downstream) untranslated regions, or UTRs, that regulate the stability and translation of mRNA molecules. It would be interesting to test them side by side in the lab and see if there is a significant difference in protein production.
A final difference between the two vaccines that is not encoded by the mRNA is in the composition of the lipid nanoparticle that is responsible for delivering the mRNA to the host cells for protein production. Probably the two vaccines use similar but different mixtures of positive charge and lipid. Nanoparticle technology allows mRNA, an enormous highly negatively charged molecule, to be internalized into cellular endosomes and escape to the cytoplasm where it can guide the production of antigenic protein. Without the special mix of positively charged fats (cationic lipids), the mRNA would be dead on injection thanks to serum RNases, and it would never accumulate significantly in the cell.
Another interesting note is that the researchers have posted the sequence of the DNA copy deduced by reverse-transcribing the mRNA, since mRNA doesn't contain "T" bases but instead contains "U" bases. On top of that, therapeutic mRNAs (including Pfizer and Moderna molecules) don't even use U, but instead incorporate 1-methyl pseudouridine (m1-Psi) [caretdashcaret.com], which avoids activating the innate immune system of cells.
Don't confuse the innate immune system with the adaptive immune system. The job of the innate immune system is to recognize incoming viruses, often in the form of extracellular RNA, and initiate the shutdown of protein synthesis and often cell death. Earlier generation mRNA vaccines that incorporated U instead of m1-Psi exhibited strong activation of the innate immune system and were less effective at hijacking cellular protein producing machinery to manufacture antigen proteins.
All in all it's amazing what has been accomplished in the last year, but it was only possible because of decades of underlying research into this new therapeutic technology. Truly a triumph of chemistry and biology.
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So DNA contains ATDC (adenine (A), thymine(T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G)). However, RNA uses uracil instead of thymine, if I understand correctly. But the innate immune system would respond if the vaccine contained uracil (and reject the mRNA before the spike protein was produced), so they used some other c
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Jargon is unavoidable I'm afraid, but the basic idea is that adding a single methyl group (a carbon with 3 hydrogens) in the case of m1-Psi can block the cell's native recognition machinery, but not interfere with the protein translation machinery. A very clever and elegant biohack!
The new generation of oligonucleotide based therapies including mRNA, siRNA, Antisense Oligo and even several iterations of CRISPR are enabled through medicinal chemistry based modification of everything from the
No reply is not necessarily a good thing... (Score:1)
"We did contact Moderna a couple of weeks ago to indicate that we were hoping to include the sequence in a publication and asking if there was anything that we should reference with respect to this... no response or objection from them, so we assume that everyone is busy doing important work."
"important work" - like having their legal team working on a lawsuit!