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mRNA Vaccines: A New Era in Preventive Medicine

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VACCINES are one of the most powerful tools in modern science, essential for preventing infectious diseases worldwide. The history of vaccinology began in the early 1900s with the development of the first live attenuated vaccine against smallpox. Since then, this field has grown significantly, introducing various types of vaccines such as inactivated, subunit, toxoid, conjugate, DNA, viral-vectored, and more recently, mRNA-based vaccines. Despite their success, traditional vaccines have struggled to address certain global health threats. Diseases like HIV, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria continue to cause millions of deaths each year, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The only available vaccine for TB, known as BCG (Bacillus Calmette–Guérin), offers inconsistent protection and fails to prevent disease transmission. Meanwhile, no licensed vaccines exist yet for HIV or malaria. This has created an urgent need for new, adaptable vaccine platforms—leading to the rise o...
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Viruses to the Rescue: An Overview of Bacteriophage Therapy

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“Virus”—the first thing that comes to mind upon hearing or reading this word is typically infection , disease , and pathogenic effects . But what if we told you that some viruses can actually be used to treat diseases? Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect and attack bacteria, destroying or killing them in the process. Surprisingly, these viruses can be harnessed to treat certain infections — this approach is called phage therapy . Phage therapy isn’t a new technology; it was first discovered by Frederick Twort (UK) and Félix d'Hérelle (France) in 1915–1917. After its discovery, phage therapy was implemented in Europe and the Soviet Union to treat bacterial infections. However, its use in the West declined after the mass production of antibiotics in the 1940s. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union continued to research and use phage therapy. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in phage therapy due to the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, such as ...
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Location: Pune, Maharashtra, India
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An Introduction to CRISPR: The Gene-Editing Breakthrough of Modern Biology

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We must have come across the article on the use of CRISPR technology for cutting out HIV-1 DNA from human immune cells. Let’s now take a look into the history and working of this technique… CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a genome editing technology that allows precise modification of DNA in living organisms. It works like molecular scissors—cutting DNA at a specific location —and makes it possible to add, remove, or replace specific sequences. It was originally discovered as a defense mechanism in E. coli against viruses (bacteriophages) by Yoshizumi Ishino in 1987. Bacteria store small pieces of viral DNA in their CRISPR sequences to “remember” past infections—just like our B cells remember viruses. If the same virus attacks again, Cas proteins (cutting enzymes like Cas9, Cas12, Cas13, etc.) use this stored information to recognize and disable the viral DNA. The guide RNA (gRNA) carries the sequence that matches the target DNA. Step-by-step...
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