Indian de mRNA vaccine priced at ₹2292, will be available as a booster dose

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Biotechnology

Concept :

India’s first indigenously developed mRNA vaccine against the dominant Omicron variant of the COVID19 coronavirus will cost ₹2,292, Sanjay Singh, CEO, Gennova Bio pharmaceuticals, said at a press conference.

mRNA Vaccine

General traditional vaccines function by way of introducing antigens and stimulating an antibody response. But mRNA vaccines are different from traditional vaccines.
mRNA fragment is a piece of virus that carries instructions to build antigens of the virus.
mRNA vaccines inject a fragment of the RNA sequence of a virus directly into the cells, which then stimulates an adaptive immune response.
One of the crucial advantages of RNA vaccines is their ability to stimulate cellular immunity.
However mRNA vaccines will require cold conditions for storage as unlike traditional DNA vaccines, mRNA vaccines are more fragile as the molecules degrade within minutes when exposed to the outside environment.
mRNA vaccines trick the body into producing some of the viral proteins themselves. They work by using messenger RNA or mRNA, which is the molecule that essentially puts DNA instructions into action. mRNA is used as a template to build a protein inside a cell.

Monovalent and Bivalent Vaccines

A monovalent vaccine contains one strain of the virus in question, while a bivalent vaccine contains two strains.
In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, the monovalent version contains the original SARS-CoV-2 viral strain, whereas the bivalent vaccine consists of the original strain plus another.
The mRNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna are ‘bivalent’, meaning they contain synthetic spike proteins that are effective against both the older Wuhan strain as well as the newer Omicron strains.