mRNA vaccine

Whatever happened to ... the Brazilian besties creating an mRNA vaccine as a gift to the world

4:05pm September 09, 2024

Frustrated when Brazil could not get COVID vaccines, two Brazilian doctors (who have been best friends since college) decided to invent their own version and offer up the patent essentially for free.

Secretary-General of the Nobel Assembly Thomas Perlmann speaks in front of a picture of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday.

Nobel Prize goes to scientists who made mRNA COVID vaccines possible

2:37pm October 02, 2023

Hungarian-born biochemist Katalin Karikó and American immunologist Drew Weissman found that a chemical change to genetic code called mRNA eliminated a problematic side effect when used in vaccines.

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Gerhardt Boukes, chief scientist at Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, formulates mRNA for use in a vaccine against COVID-19. The company — based in Cape Town, South Africa — is the linchpin of a global project to enable low- and middle-income countries to make mRNA vaccines against all manner of diseases.

Whatever happened to the project to crack the wealthy world's lock on mRNA vaccines?

4:02pm September 12, 2023

by Nurith Aizenman

Lower-income countries did not get the COVID vaccines they needed. So the World Bank and other partners tapped a South African company to cook up the (undisclosed) recipe for the Moderna mRNA vaccine.

Munyaradzi Musvosvi, a researcher who works for the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative, in a storage facility at the University of Cape Town that holds in deep freeze the blood samples of people exposed to TB. He's part of a team working to develop a potential mRNA vaccine by looking at the immune cells in the blood samples.

Frozen cells reveal a clue for a vaccine to block the deadly TB bug

1:33pm March 06, 2023

by Nurith Aizenman

Tuberculosis kills 1.6 million a year — the second deadliest infectious disease after COVID-19. Using immune cells and mRNA technology, scientists in South Africa are working on a new vaccine.

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Gerhardt Boukes, chief scientist at Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, formulates mRNA for use in a new vaccine against COVID-19. The company — based in Cape Town, South Africa — is the linchpin of a global project to enable low- and middle-income countries to make mRNA vaccines against all manner of diseases.

How a scrappy African startup could forever change the world of vaccines

11:20am December 29, 2022

by Nurith Aizenman

Afrigen is the linchpin of global project to use mRNA technology to empower low-resource countries to make their own vaccines against killer diseases from TB to HIV. What will it take to succeed?

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Brazilian scientist Sotiris Missailidis heads research and development at his country's premier agency for vaccine development, the Bio-Manguinhos Fiocruz foundation. He's been a key advocate for shifting Brazil's strategy toward inventing its own vaccine

A dire moment in the pandemic ... was the chance he'd been waiting for

9:07pm July 18, 2022

by Nurith Aizenman

How Sotiris Missailidis, head of R&D in Brazil's vaccine agency, used the COVID crisis to push through a game-changing effort for middle-income countries to invent their own mRNA vaccine.

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Patricia Neves (left) and Ana Paula Ano Bom take a break at the institute in Rio de Janeiro where they work. The two scientists say they've been inseparable since they met in college. Now their friendship has made it possible to launch a remarkable partne

These Brazilian besties are inventing an mRNA vaccine as a gift to the world

6:20pm July 13, 2022

by Nurith Aizenman

Pfizer and Moderna have refused to divulge details of how to make their cutting-edge COVID shots. Here's what two scientists — and longtime best friends — are doing about it.

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A registered nurse administers the COVID-19 vaccine at a high school gym in Corona, California. Scientists are trying to determine if vaccines (and boosters) will offer protection against the newly identified omicron variant.

Scientists race to answer the question: Will vaccines protect us against omicron?

5:35pm December 02, 2021

by Michaeleen Doucleff

There's serious concern about the effectiveness of vaccines against the omicron strain. But there's also reason to be hopeful — especially for those who've had a booster.

Members of a team at the Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines lab in Cape Town, South Africa. The World Health Organization has enlisted the company to replicate Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine.

Moderna won't share its vaccine recipe. WHO has hired an African startup to crack it

1:53pm October 20, 2021

by Nurith Aizenman

It's the first step in an audacious plan to solve vaccine inequity by setting up the manufacturing of mRNA vaccines across low-resource countries,

An illustration of antibodies attacking a coronavirus particle.

New Studies Find Evidence Of 'Superhuman' Immunity To COVID-19 In Some Individuals

3:07pm September 07, 2021

by Michaeleen Doucleff

That's how some scientists describe the findings of a series of studies looking at the antibodies created by individuals who were infected by the coronavirus and then had an mRNA vaccine.