First, a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine is injected into a muscle in your upper arm. Some muscle cells take the mRNA instructions in the vaccine and make a harmless piece of a protein called a spike protein.

Many people first learned about mRNA vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic, when the companies Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna released their COVID-19 vaccines. The Pfizer-BioNTech shot was the ...

But mRNA vaccines work particularly well in this situation because they can be made so fast. If you want to make a bunch of doses of a vaccine, you need to actually grow those viruses somehow.

The new genetic vaccines to prevent Covid-19 infections use mRNA technology, instead of the approach used in traditional vaccines, like those for measles and polio. These new genetic vaccines ...

By comparison, "mRNA vaccines can be developed and manufactured at a faster rate than other kinds of vaccines, which may be important when a new virus emerges or evolves quickly like we have seen ...

This approach mimics what the SARS-CoV-2 does in nature – but the vaccine mRNA codes only for the critical fragment of the viral protein.

AP Photo/Paul Sancya 5. Subzero storage makes distribution a challenge For all of their amazing attributes, mRNA vaccines do have at least one weakness: “If they get too warm or too cold they spoil.

It makes yourselves basically do the work of expressing that antigen for your immune system to recognize for you. Both the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine are mRNA vaccines that work this way.

It makes yourselves basically do the work of expressing that antigen for your immune system to recognize for you. Both the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine are mRNA vaccines that work this way.

So how do mRNA vaccines work? Katalin Karikó, the Penn Medicine-scientist whose research laid the foundation for both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines, calls it a “middleman between ...

Cells break down mRNA quickly once it's used, so these molecules will not linger in the body. They also do not enter the nucleus so they will not impact a person's DNA. Scientist Katalin Karikó has ...