Researchers from Stanford University have reversed engineered the Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine to study its mRNA sequence.
According to the details, a group of researchers from Stanford University have taken leftover drops in vials of Moderna’s vaccine to determine the sequence that is used in the immunization.
The researchers have posted the sequence on the open-access website called GitHub.
In the researchers’ post, it was written, “Sharing of sequence information for broadly used therapeutics has substantial benefit in design of improved clinical tools and precise diagnostics.”
They explain that knowing the vaccine’s sequence will allow diagnostic labs to more easily differentiate between RNA from the vaccine versus that from an actual viral infection.
“As the vaccine has been rolling out, these sequences have begun to show up in many different investigational and diagnostic studies. Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets is of great utility,” the researchers wrote.
It is to be noted that after collecting the vaccine samples, the researchers obtained permission from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to perform tests on these tiny leftovers.