Reading the primary claim is fascinating: "A composition, comprising: a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) comprising an open reading frame encoding a betacoronavirus (BetaCoV) S protein or S protein subunit formulated in a lipid nanoparticle."
I have a "I'm sure that means something to somebody" feeling. It's also surprising that the remaining claims seem to describe the resulting bits of the sequence, and that that primary claim can stand on its own. Of course, I'm by no means an expert.
> I have a "I'm sure that means something to somebody" feeling.
Break it down! It's not so bad:
> A composition
A bunch of stuff
> a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)
mRNA are cellular instructions on how to make proteins that are read by ribosomes that make those proteins as they read along.
> an open reading frame
This is something that starts with a "start codon" and ends with an "ending codon" and encodes valid instructions to make a protein between.
> encoding a betacoronavirus (BetaCoV) S protein or S protein subunit
The instructions refer to the spike protein of a betacoronavirus, or a fragment thereof, because this is what we want the immune system to pay attention to (and make antibodies to bind to and neutralize).
> in a lipid nanoparticle
The immune system gets pissed off about mRNA floating around, because that's one of the things that happens with active infection. So if you want this to get into cells and tell them to make your protein, you need to encase it so that it mostly escapes immune notice itself.
If you squint you could say that viruses are already doing that. A lipid bilayer is a key component of several kinds of membranes. All of our cells have a lipid bilayers separating the inside from the outside. The corona virus is also built from these same lipids, which is why it's vulnerable to soap.
Anyway, I think the important thing that the other commenter was saying is that mRNA needs to be carefully packaged to be medically useful. You can't inject pure RNA as a vaccine because not only is the mRNA going to be quickly degraded before it gets anywhere but if the immune system sees any RNA floating around by then it kicks itself into a frenzy because free-floating RNA is usually a sign that something nasty is afoot.
They have. That spike protein is part of their envelope ("nanoparticle").
The envelopes used in an RNA vaccine are generally simpler, because they're working under different constraints than viruses. For example, their envelopes don't need to be easily manufactured in a cell.
But some RNA and DNA vaccines do use viruses as their delivery mechanisms, eg the J&J COVID vaccine.
Doesn't this describe almost ANY vaccine - I think that it's probably bad public policy to allow anyone to patent ALL COVID vaccines - I think that patenting a particular vaccine (a particular mRNA string) should be allowed, but not effective wildcards in the RNA
No. It doesn't describe the viral vector vaccines (J&J/AstraZeneca). It doesn't describe the inactivated virus vaccines. It doesn't include the viral fragment (NovaVax) vaccines. And it wouldn't describe some possible mRNA vaccines because of differences in formulation or differences in targeting.
While this particular Moderna claim would likely affect BioNTech/Pfizer's mRNA vaccine, it's not clear whether it would survive in litigation, too.
As to a "specific string"-- if you could just pad a few codons onto the end and not be violating the patent, that's not too worthwhile.
This is a great animation of the life cycle of an HIV virus. It’s not exactly what happens with the pandemic virus but it gives you a good idea of the complexity of the process of viral reproduction (vaccine or immune response isn’t covered here):
Nice!!! I didn’t even notice that was uploaded! The differences between HIV and SARS-CoV-2 makes me wonder what reliability there is in this process, and if some viruses are more reliably able to enter the cell than others (presumably those that are more infectious?)
It blows my mind to see how life (and death) work at the molecular level--it's almost like some kind of manmade machine, but far more subtle and complex.
These might interest you then: 3d visualizations of cellular processes in real time. I was shown them in my intro to biology class, which filled me with the same interest.
It's been decades since I was in high school but I really hope these videos, or something similarly realistic and mind-bending, is in the modern biology curriculum. Learning about Darwin, Mendel, Watson and Crick and the experiments they did to develop an understanding of biology was informative, but it wasn't compelling to me. These and the work of Drew Berry and WEHI are just amazing:
I like the wehi videos because they take effort to make the molecular motions appear to be random, a result of stuff blundering about: https://youtu.be/7Hk9jct2ozY
Just remember that it's not really orchestrated. All of the molecules involve are kind of randomly blundering about and it's one-in-a-million collisions that are responsible for getting shit done (on membranes it's more like one in a thousand and on ropelike structures like dna or actin it's one in a hundred).
As a biochemist, that's one of the things that has kept me interested in the work - it's truly mind boggling what is going on at the molecular level every second of our lives.
I love reading articles around biology, micro/molecular biology in particular, and looking for references to agency in the text. 'selects', 'filters', 'checks', 'seeks', etc when the reality is that the whole thing is just a massive chemical reaction.
Yes.One must know all programming of molecules and all laws current in the universe. perfect hierarchy from atoms to the cells, from cells to plants, animals from animals to earth, from earth to stars
Coronavirus replication is pretty dramatically different from HIV replication-- coronaviruses are not retroviruses, and do not have a step where viral RNA is converted into DNA and integrated into the host cell's genome. Instead, coronavirus RNA is directly interpreted by the cell's ribosomes to make the proteins that ultimately build and comprise the replicated viruses.
The mRNA vaccines work in much the same way-- it's just that the mRNA vaccines only include the code for the spike protein and not the rest of the virus's machinery. So you get the vaccine and your body produces a bunch of spike protein by itself, which gives your immune system the opportunity to learn how to identify and react to the spike protein before it sees it on a real virus.
Claims are read in the context of the body of the patent and generally known and/or cited knowledge in the field in question. As long as you define precisely what you mean by your terms in the body, you can be as succinct as you want in the claims.
I think that's the question. I'm very much used to reading "A machine-readable medium, comprising..." I'm curious what bits are unique to COVID-19, and what bits are generally protecting the idea of using a carrier to send a specific protein. In this case, is it the "S" protein phrasing that protects the specific embodiment of COVID19's spike?
If it's just the spike protein encapsulated in a lipid nanoparticule (for isolation and transportation?), that looks like something not creative and quite established for people in the field of genetic material transport.
My layperson's understanding is that the actual spike protein and/or mRNA are modified from the natural versions. Both for stabilization (if either falls apart quickly, they're of no use) and for response optimization.
So somewhat like how a fishing fly differs from the insect it represents.
https://www.modernatx.com/sites/default/files/US10702600.pdf
though they do present multiple sequences, so I guess you'd have to go to the FDA application to figure out exactly which one got used.