Vaccines have been around for over four centuries now. As kids, we have all dreaded the occasional vaccine shot, but vaccines have become a necessary evil now-a-days. The concept first used by Edward Jenner and later applied by Louis Pasteur, has now been developed tremendously and used at a large scale to combat the life threatening diseases that originate every other day.
A biological preparation that provides enhanced and improved immunity towards a particular disease is termed as a vaccine. A typical vaccine preparation contains a weakened, killed or a part of the disease causing microorganism or toxins or one of the surface proteins of the same. This agent instigates an immune response in the body that leads to the recognition of the agent as a foreign agent, after which it is destroyed. The immune system recalls it and easily recognizes and destroys it during any future encounters.
With recent advancements in science and technology, the field of Vaccinology has also progressed. From the development of the vaccine to its administration to the patient; there is a high level of precision, scrutiny, and technology that is being practiced. Vaccines are broadly classified into two groups namely; prophylactic (meaning to prevent future infections) or therapeutic (meaning to tackle an existing disease, such as cancer, etc.).
Various types of vaccines include inactivated, attenuated, toxoid, subunit, conjugate, experimental, valence, and heterotypic. These different types of vaccines are categorized on the basis of the strategies that are used to make them, to reduce the risk of development of certain diseases, and also retaining the ability to induce an immune response in the future. The most recent advancement in this space, due to the recent biotechnological spurge, has been the development of Plant based and Recombinant vaccines.
Conventional Way of Vaccine Production: An Overview
The overall vaccine production involves several steps:
Generation of the Antigen (viral component): Over the years, vaccines have been manufactured using fertilized embryonic eggs and cell cultures (bacterial, yeast, or mammalian).
Using the embryonic egg method requires a time span of about four months to produce one batch of vaccines. It is well established that safety and effectiveness of the vaccines produced by the fertilized embryonic eggs are the two chief advantages that this method offers.
Know in detail…
