Synthesis of mRNA vaccines encoding the M2 protein and artificial immunogens of the influenza virus

Abstract

Vaccination is considered one of the most effective means of preventing influenza. However, the variability of the influenza virus allows it to escape from permanent specific immunity. Therefore, an urgent task is to create vaccines capable of inducing an immune response against a wide range of different strains of the human influenza virus. One of the approaches to the creation of a universal vaccine against influenza is the production of mRNA of vaccines encoding genes of artificial immunogens containing conserved fragments of proteins of various subtypes of the influenza virus. The objective of this work was to obtain mRNA vaccines encoding influenza virus antigens using template synthesis. As a template, we used DNA vaccine constructs encoding a conserved fragments of influenza virus hemagglutinin stem and M2 protein. In this work, we optimized the conditions for RNA synthesis using T7 phage polymerase with DNA templates, followed by its capping and polyadenylation.