UK trial to mix and match Covid vaccines to try to improve potency
by Sarah Boseley Health editor from Science | The Guardian on (#5BBSG)
Pilot planned for January will give subjects a shot of both Oxford/AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech versions
A trial is likely to go ahead in January to find out whether mixing and matching Covid vaccines gives better protection than two doses of the same one, the head of the British government's taskforce has said.
The Pfizer/BioNTech Covid jab is an mRNA vaccine. Essentially, mRNA is a molecule used by living cells to turn the gene sequences in DNA into the proteins that are the building blocks of all their fundamental structures. A segment of DNA gets copied (transcribed") into a piece of mRNA, which in turn gets read" by the cell's tools for synthesising proteins.
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