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Review
. 2024 Oct:213:115419.
doi: 10.1016/j.addr.2024.115419. Epub 2024 Aug 5.

Advances in the design and delivery of RNA vaccines for infectious diseases

Abhijeet Girish Lokras  1 , Thomas Rønnemoes Bobak  1 , Saahil Sandeep Baghel  1 , Federica Sebastiani  2 , Camilla Foged  3
Affiliations
Free article
Review

Advances in the design and delivery of RNA vaccines for infectious diseases

Abhijeet Girish Lokras et al. Adv Drug Deliv Rev. 2024 Oct.
Free article

Abstract

RNA medicines represent a paradigm shift in treatment and prevention of critical diseases of global significance, e.g., infectious diseases. The highly successful messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) were developed at record speed during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. A consequence of this is exceptionally shortened vaccine development times, which in combination with adaptability makes the RNA vaccine technology highly attractive against infectious diseases and for pandemic preparedness. Here, we review state of the art in the design and delivery of RNA vaccines for infectious diseases based on different RNA modalities, including linear mRNA, self-amplifying RNA, trans-amplifying RNA, and circular RNA. We provide an overview of the clinical pipeline of RNA vaccines for infectious diseases, and present analytical procedures, which are paramount for characterizing quality attributes and guaranteeing their quality, and we discuss future perspectives for using RNA vaccines to combat pathogens beyond SARS-CoV-2.

Keywords: Delivery systems; Infectious diseases; Lipid nanoparticles; Nanomedicine; RNA; Vaccines; Vaccinology.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.