Different vaccine types

In a very short Medium article today I go into the different types of vaccines that are on offer currently, with helpful information which can be understood easily. Hope you enjoy the article.

➡ Types of vaccines
Synthetic vaccines — chemically synthesized peptides, they can be made to order for any wanted sequence, however, there may be few in use today

Recombinant vaccines — these are produced by genetic engineering, through recombinant DNA technology.

Subunit vaccines — these types of vaccines consists of only some components of the virus, sufficient enough to induce a protective immune response, but not enough to allow the danger of infection.

Toxoid vaccines — these types of vaccines use a toxin made by the germ that causes a disease. They create immunity to the parts of the germ that cause disease instead of the germ itself.

Virus vector vaccines — these have been genetically manipulated to express protective antigens from relatively unrelated disease-causing viruses, the idea is to utilise the genome of a well-understood attenuated virus to express and present antigens to the immune system

Inactivated vaccines — these vaccines are produced by exposing the virus to a denaturing agent under precisely controlled conditions, the main objective is to cause loss of virus infectivity without loss of antigenicity, the virus used in production is a killed virus.

Live (attenuated) Virus vaccines — use of a weakened live virus with reduction of causing the disease to the vaccine host in order to stimulate an immune response

mRNA vaccines — an mRNA vaccine uses a copy of a molecule called messenger RNA to produce an immune response

(Sources: Nature, Alan J. Cann 1997. Principles of Molecular Virology: Second Edition, Chapter 6, Infection, p. 188–189 & HHS)

Well, there we have it, the different types of vaccines that we have in circulation from the past and today as well.

💥 Thanks for reading, Lawrence. Please consider a small contribution, in the form of a beer as all articles are created in my small amount of spare time: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/LawrenceRob