But also decades before they've been looking into this. But it's not new research, it actually, as you said, goes back to Zika. Marshall: So when we hear that this is a brand new technology, it's never been approved before. So the technology for doing this, and the approach has actually been done before, with, for example, Zika virus, but they could never get it to clinical trials. in the case of Zika virus, you know, there was this massive expansion. In fact, Moderna, developed the technology really, initially against Zika virus. Kuhn: Well, this technology has been around for a few years. Marshall: And why is it that this virus is able to have that protein and able to have that immune response? Specifically? And that's the vaccine and it's packaged in a lipid nanoparticle for delivery purposes. And that information is encoded in what we call messenger RNA mRNA. And so this technology basically has the information, the genetic information that will make this protein when you put it into a cell. In the case of COVID-19, we're interested in a surface protein that we call the spike on the low glycoprotein spike for short. And so the technology that Moderna and and Pfizer are pushing right now is one in which you have the coding sequence that is the information that codes for the viral protein that you're interested in. So those are kind of the standard traditional type vaccines. And that would be using purified proteins that would be injected. And we use those proteins as stimulants for your immune system. That is it's attenuated, it made that a vaccine, or we've expressed proteins, and use those proteins that are on the surface of a virus. Richard Kuhn: So traditionally, what we've done is for viruses, we've either taken a virus and inactivated it, and use that as a vaccine, or we've taken a virus and made it less infectious.

We've heard so much about these front runner vaccines and how they're different from vaccines of days past explain it to us, how does the science work? Kuhn, thank you so much for joining us here at track the Vax, I want to jump right in mRNAs. The following is an abridged transcript of his interview with 'Track the Vax' host Serena Marshall:

Dna replication explained