Researchers at Pfizer and BioNTech said they believe they can make an even better vaccine for shingles using promising messenger RNA technology perfected in their COVID-19 shots.
Clinical trials of the vaccine for shingles, a debilitating disease triggered by a chronic form of the virus that causes chickenpox, will begin in the second half of the year, according to an announcement from the companies.
“Adults aged 50 years and older, as well as vulnerable populations like cancer patients, are at an increased risk of shingles. Our goal is to develop an mRNA vaccine with a favorable safety profile and high efficacy, which is at the same time more easily scalable to support global access,” BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said.
Shingles cause painful blistering rashes that most often appear around the torso. Even when the rashes clear up, patients might experience postherpetic neuralgia, a type of damage to nerve fibers that can cause lasting pain. Other complications of the shingles virus include vision loss and neurological problems, such as facial paralysis and brain inflammation.
The proliferation of mRNA technology in vaccines began with the Pfizer-BioNTech shots to protect against COVID-19. The technology itself is not new. In fact, it has been in development since the 1990s, though early research struggled to get adequate funding because scientists had not yet ironed out early roadblocks. Scientists endeavored to identify a vehicle for getting the genetic material into the cells. They discovered that by encasing mRNA in lipid nanoparticles, or fat bubbles, it could slip into cells without causing severe inflammation and degradation by the body. That genetic material instructs cells to create a blueprint of the protein found on the coronavirus, prompting an immune response to the invading pathogens in the event of infection.
“In the late 1990s, we became interested in mRNA and its potential for vaccination,” Ozlem Tureci, one of BioNTech’s founders, told the Atlantic last fall. “You could essentially present to our immune system the blueprint of a wanted foe — in this case, the cancer and its specific molecules. Then you could deliver instructions to act upon that wanted poster and destroy the foe.”
Infectious disease experts lauded the development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which can be tailored in labs relatively easily to target specific pathogens. Because the mRNA is produced in a chemical process rather than a biological one, like the flu vaccine, mRNA production can be scaled up quickly to produce massive quantities of product, as seen during the massive vaccine rollout early last year.
“The vaccine field has been forever transformed and forever advanced because of COVID-19,” said Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Harvard Medical School, during the spring 2021 rollout.
John Cooke, the medical director of the RNA Therapeutics Program at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, said, “This is just the beginning.”
Several scientists have undertaken years of research into practical applications of mRNA technology in new vaccines. BioNTech, a partner company in the development of the first COVID-19 vaccine, has initiated phase 2 clinical trials of a vaccine that targets proteins on cancerous tumor cells. The objective is to prevent cancer relapse in patients who have completed treatment and entered remission. The pharmaceutical company is developing specialized cancer vaccines, and scientists are exploring the possibility of a vaccine for HIV.
“We identify cancer mutations that are unique to every patient. Every cancer patient has their own mutations, like a fingerprint. We biopsy the tumor, sequence it, and design a unique, individualized vaccine for each patient,” Tureci said.
Pfizer-BioNTech’s new vaccine would compete with GlaxoSmithKline’s two-dose vaccine Shingrix, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2017.
