Member-only story
An Elegant Platform
By Nana Dadzie Ghansah
Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine — NVX-CoV2373 — ,ay be the last US-made vaccine to go for approval, but its platform might be the most elegant…if you ask me.
Unlike those on the market already, it is neither RNA nor DNA-based. It is a protein-based vaccine, and that protein is none other than the notorious spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.
Like using mRNA for therapeutics, the idea behind the technique Novavax uses was also rejected by the scientific world for years. This is the original paper by Gale Smith, the Ph.D. behind it (Smith GE et al. Mol Cell Biol 1983 Dec; 3(12):2156–65).
It is a process that involves the use of DNA, a virus that infects insects, cells from the ovary of the fall armyworm moth, a nanoparticle, and an extract from the Chilean soapbark tree, Quillaja saponaria.
Let’s look at the process in a simplified fashion:
1. The scientists at Novavax used the spike protein’s known genetic sequence to create a strip of DNA that coded for the spike.
2. They then inserted this DNA strip in a virus called the Baculovirus, a virus that can infect insects and insert DNA into their genome.
3. The Baculovirus with the spike protein DNA in its genome was then used to infect cells…
