Lipid Nanoparticle Formulation and Development for mRNA Vaccine Delivery

Recently, mRNA vaccines have drawn extensive attention due to its potency to tackle various unmet therapeutical issues that are unable to be solved by traditional vaccine technologies. For example, live-attenuated vaccines sometimes exhibit safety drawbacks that could potentially induce pathogenic diseases. While subunit vaccines have been developed as an improved safe alternative, they are less efficient and mostly take effect in the presence of adjuvants.1

Although mRNA vaccines combine the advantages of the abovementioned vaccines and avoid of their risks, they still have to face some major issues including insufficient intracellular delivery efficiency and instability. To this end, several strategies have been developed to bypass such problems, and lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) stand as the most frequently used non-viral vector for the merits of efficiently bind and condense RNA, protect against degradation in the extracellular space and localize the payload at the membrane of the desired target cell, followed by cellular uptake and endosomal escape into the cytosol.2 Table 1 was taken from reference 3 which lists out many of the currently published lipid nanoparticles mRNA vaccine.