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Originally Posted by GratefulCitizen
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GC- The article at the attached link does a good job of explaining the process of immunity development. Your question relates to the method of formulation for vaccines. All vaccines need to present the antigens (proteins) of the virus to develop an immune response to the target virus. Historically, the virus was either killed or attenuated so as not to cause disease when presented to the subject. You may recall vaccines being described as either live virus i.e. attenuated or killed virus.
The time required for vaccine development was primarily that required to isolate the target virus and produce it in sufficient quantity then either kill it or attenuate it for formulation as a vaccine product. This typically requires one to two years of development.
The next step is the efficacy and safety testing for regulatory approval, i.e. clinical trials. This may require another year of development time. SurfNTurf provided a pretty good summary of this process earlier in this thread.
In the present case for Covid vaccine development the mRNA technology was used to significantly reduce development time. In this case the mRNA to the spike proteins of SARS COV-2 were formulated for injection and the mRNA produced the protein identical to the spike protein. The body develops immunity in the same way it would if exposed to the virus itself. This reduced the development time by two years. Pre-purchase of the finished product in bulk reduced development time by another year.
As to your question about peptide vaccines, this relates to the synthetic development of the key antigenic fragments i.e. peptides in the spike protein. These peptides are formulated for injection into a patient and development of immunity to these specific antigens. The key here is to develop the correct mixture of peptides to provide an immune response targeting the spike proteins. The advantage to this strategy is the ability to develop/synthesize multiple peptides quickly and be able to respond to variants of SARS Cov-2.
I hope this helps.
