ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted an unprecedented race to find the means to contrast the SARS-CoV-2 infection, resulting in a huge common effort to develop an efficacious vaccine as soon as possible and an exceptional acceleration of the review process to ensure its safety and efficacy. Many technological platforms are currently under investigation or have already been approved, including those based on the inactivated virus, mRNA- or DNA-based vaccines expressing viral antigens, recombinant SARS-CoV-2 proteins and vector-based vaccines exploiting chimeric adenoviruses. The emergence of new viral variants has represented ad additional challenge and has induced the entire scientific community to potentiate the monitoring process of the ongoing vaccination campaigns. In this scenario, laboratory medicine certainly plays a pivotal role not only in the diagnosis of the infection but also in monitoring the immune response to vaccines and in the detection and prevention of clinically significant adverse events, ultimately contributing to the determination of the biological and clinical efficacy of the available vaccines. This review offers an overview of the most recent and updated data on anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and the technological principles behind them as well as on the resources that laboratory medicine can offer to support the vaccination campaigns. All these aspects represent a rapid step forward in the clinical field which transcends the COVID-19 outbreak and that will certainly pave the way for the future scientific research.
ABSTRACT
The introduction of vaccination programs aiming at inducing an active immune response against pathogens dates back to the first experimental approaches at the end of the 18th century and, since then, has represented a turning point in public health measures to contrast infections. The scientific improvements of the last few years in the field of molecular biology, immunology and genetic engineering have allowed to design new vaccines able to solve, at least in part, the hurdles of conventional vaccine platforms. From the first vaccines based on the inoculation of the whole microorganism, the scientific research has gone in the direction of platforms able to carry only a few or even a single antigenic component of the pathogen, ranging from subunit vaccines to those based on mRNA or DNA. This achievement has made vaccines easier and quicker to develop and, above all, much safer, and it has involved scientific fields that extend far beyond the attempt to fight infectious diseases, such as cancer research. The purpose of this review is to present an overview of the currently available vaccine platforms, their mechanism of action, and the advantages and pitfalls behind each approach.