Dendrimer-Mediated Delivery of DNA and RNA Vaccines

DNA and RNA vaccines (nucleic acid-based vaccines) are a promising platform for vaccine development. The first mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech) were approved in 2020, and a DNA vaccine (Zydus Cadila, India), in 2021. They display unique benefits in the current COVID-19 pandemic. Nucleic acid-based vaccines have a number of advantages, such as safety, efficacy, and low cost. They are potentially faster to develop, cheaper to produce, and easier to store and transport. A crucial step in the technology of DNA or RNA vaccines is choosing an efficient delivery method. Nucleic acid delivery using liposomes is the most popular approach today, but this method has certain disadvantages. Therefore, studies are actively underway to develop various alternative delivery methods, among which synthetic cationic polymers such as dendrimers are very attractive. Dendrimers are three-dimensional nanostructures with a high degree of molecular homogeneity, adjustable size, multivalence, high surface functionality, and high aqueous solubility. The biosafety of some dendrimers has been evaluated in several clinical trials presented in this review. Due to these important and attractive properties, dendrimers are already being used to deliver a number of drugs and are being explored as promising carriers for nucleic acid-based vaccines. This review summarizes the literature data on the development of dendrimer-based delivery systems for DNA and mRNA vaccines.

[Investigation of the amino acid sequences of open reading frames of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complete genome with the use of the protein family pattern bank Prof_Pat]

The new version of protein family patterns bank Prof_Pat 1.16 was used to investigate 3924 amino acid sequences of open reading frames of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strain H37Rv. The similarity to proteins with the known function was confirmed for 2772 amino acid sequences. Possible functions for 44 thus far unidentified sequences of open reading frames were determined.

[Bank of samples from the Prof_Pat protein family, assessment of efficacy]

The PROF_PAT protein pattern database has been created and maintained so as to comprise the maximal number of the SWISS-PROT + TrEMBL proteins as patterns. The present paper describes some characteristic features of PROF_PAT to assist the potential user. New amino acid sequences (10938) from the SWISS-PROT database have been analyzed to determine the boundary values of the "score" parameter to distinguish random and significant similarities. Analysis through the Internet of 20 amino acid sequences having no descriptions in the TrEMBL database demonstrated that PROF_PAT, being highly competitive with its counterparts in specificity, surpasses them in amplitude and variety of proteins, working several times as fast. The real representation of protein families in the PROF_PAT database (release 1.11), which contains 50,149 patterns of 344,429 proteins, has been estimated at 31,450.