Experimental Vaccines: An Overview

By Armand Zeiders


Vaccines are certainly one of the most important scientific contributions in history, saving the lives of millions of people around the globe. Vaccines are manufactured biologically and they aid in improving a person's immunity to a particular disease, such as measles, whooping cough, polio, tetanus and many other serious ailments. While vaccines all help us fight off diseases, there are many different types of vaccines and each works a bit differently.

Today there are a huge variety of vaccines available, but they don't all work in exactly the same way. The very common ones are known as killed vaccines or inactivated vaccines and attenuated vaccines. With the help of our technology and medical advancements, there are now several kinds of different experimental vaccines that are currently being developed by research teams around the world.

One type of experimental vaccine is called a recombinant vector vaccine. These can create immunity by combing the physiology or structure of a specific micro-organism with the DNA of another micro-organism. This type of vaccine is supported by the creation of laboratory-made DNA, which is typically just called recombinant DNA. A hepatitis B vaccine has been created using recombinant DNA. This type of vaccine has many advantages, not the least of which is the ease of storage and the relatively low cost of production.

DNA vaccinations are yet another type of vaccine in mostly experimental stages and this type basically DNA to act as a weapon against a particular virus or disease. With this type of vaccine, scientists take the DNA from the infectious agent they are trying to prevent from harming humans and alter it somewhat and then reintroduce into a cell to provoke an immune response. This response teaches our immune system to recognize the harmful entity and destroy it if ever it invades our bodies again in the future.

There are many types of cells in our body, and within our immune system you will find dendritic cells. These cells are like little messengers, alerting the immune system when harmful viruses and bacteria break into the body. Scientists are working on a way to create a dendritic cell vaccine and this looks like a promising treatment for highly advanced cancers. Our immune system has an excellent memory and when it fights off a particular type of invader, it remembers the invader and every time it encounters this invader again, it begins to fight. The dendritic cells are particularly good at recognizing cancer cells, so dendritic cell vaccines are being developed and studied and also a few are actually being used to help treat cancer.

Success was found with some of these experimental vaccines though not all of them since many are still in research stages. Biotech firms have played an integral part in providing scientists with many services that aid in vaccine research such as custom recombinant protein services. In the future, we hope to see more cures and treatments made with the help of experimental vaccines.




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