A new generation of lipid nanoparticles could lead to better mRNA vaccines for COVID19 and other diseases.
As any dietician will tell you, some fats are good—and that is surely true of the little fatty balls found in two of the world’s most widely used COVID-19 vaccines. Known as lipid nanoparticles , these tiny bubbles of fat encase messenger RNA that encodes a viral protein, helping ferry it into cells and shield it from destructive enzymes. The technology was key to the success of COVID-19 shots from Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech collaboration.
“This is a system that clearly has legs,” says biochemist Pieter Cullis of the University of British Columbia , Vancouver, who created the first LNPs, but “we still need to increase the efficiency of LNPs—that’s for sure.” Cullis and colleagues developed the first LNPs about 20 years ago to carry gene-silencing drugs into cells. He and others later tailored the LNPs’ four lipid components to deliver disease-correcting mRNA to faulty cells. Now that they are being put to a new use, in vaccines, “There is still so much optimization and development that needs to happen,” says UBC bioengineer Anna Blakney, co-founder of the RNA vaccine company VaxEquity.
The Genentech team did not evaluate the comparable lipid found in the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine. But Mohamad-Gabriel Alameh and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine tested a closely related one and found that it triggered a wide range of inflammatory molecules, both desired and not.
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