Data Science Institute, Faculty of Engineering & IT, University of Technology Sydney, 15 Broadway, Ultimo, 2007, New South Wales, Australia.
School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney, 15 Broadway, Ultimo, 2007, New South Wales, Australia.
Brief Funct Genomics. 2021 Sep 11;20(5):289-303. doi: 10.1093/bfgp/elab027.
Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines have recently emerged as a new type of vaccine technology, showing strong potential to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to SARS-CoV-2 which caused the pandemic, mRNA vaccines have been developed and tested to prevent infectious diseases caused by other viruses such as Zika virus, the dengue virus, the respiratory syncytial virus, influenza H7N9 and Flavivirus. Interestingly, mRNA vaccines may also be useful for preventing non-infectious diseases such as diabetes and cancer. This review summarises the current progresses of mRNA vaccines designed for a range of diseases including COVID-19. As epitope study is a primary component in the in silico design of mRNA vaccines, we also survey on advanced bioinformatics and machine learning algorithms which have been used for epitope prediction, and review on user-friendly software tools available for this purpose. Finally, we discuss some of the unanswered concerns about mRNA vaccines, such as unknown long-term side effects, and present with our perspectives on future developments in this exciting area.
信使 RNA（mRNA）疫苗最近作为一种新型疫苗技术出现，显示出在应对 COVID-19 大流行方面的强大潜力。除了引发大流行的 SARS-CoV-2 外，还开发并测试了 mRNA 疫苗以预防其他病毒引起的传染病，如寨卡病毒、登革热病毒、呼吸道合胞病毒、流感 H7N9 和黄病毒。有趣的是，mRNA 疫苗也可能对预防非传染性疾病如糖尿病和癌症有用。这篇综述总结了针对一系列疾病（包括 COVID-19）设计的 mRNA 疫苗的最新进展。由于表位研究是 mRNA 疫苗计算机设计的主要组成部分，我们还调查了用于表位预测的先进生物信息学和机器学习算法，并综述了用于此目的的用户友好型软件工具。最后，我们讨论了关于 mRNA 疫苗的一些尚未解决的问题，例如未知的长期副作用，并对这一令人兴奋的领域的未来发展提出了我们的看法。
