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The Current State of Non-Viral Vector–Based mRNA Medicine Using Various Nanotechnology Applications
Published in Yashwant V. Pathak, Gene Delivery Systems, 2022
Kshama Patel, Preetam Dasika, Yashwant V. Pathak
The purpose of any kind of immunization treatment is to have as many people as possible retain the qualities of resilience against infection, leading to herd immunity. Herd immunity is when the majority of a community expresses immunity to a disease, making transmission more unlikely and protecting those who do not have total immunity as well.16 One primary advantage of using a non-viral vector in immunotherapy is a higher transduction efficiency than if a retrovirus was used.16 In addition to this, cell division is not needed for transduction to occur in a non-viral vector, since it becomes effective as soon as it transfects into the cytoplasm of immune cells.16 This is the opposite with viral vectors, which need to transfect into the nucleus to transduct and have enough expression to trigger an immune response.16 However, one big drawback of a non-viral vector for immunization is that the duration of expression is notably shorter than with viral templates that have a higher level of integration with the genome of the test individual (which is also a risk).16 Generally, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for non-viral vectorization through mRNA immunotherapy to achieve herd immunity, in that it is mostly safer, cheaper, and more effective in certain cases (propagation, etc.).
AI and Immunology Considerations in Pandemics and SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19
Published in Louis J. Catania, AI for Immunology, 2021
The concept of herd immunity is an epidemiological formula in which a sufficient amount of people are immunized or vaccinated against a pathogen, thus reducing the rate of infection throughout the population. The vaccination levels must produce a threshold called the “R-Naught” or RO (The SIR [‘susceptible-infectious-recovered’]) formulation, a factor that determines the transmissibility of the pathogen. It denotes the average number of secondary cases of an infectious disease that one case would generate in a completely susceptible population. That is, when one infected person infects greater than one other person, a potential exponential increase in infections results leading to an epidemic or pandemic. If, however, transmission on average remains below an RO of one person, this will result in a decreasing spread in infection and eventually into a majority of the population (an estimated 60%–70% needed) to produce “herd immunity.”48
Medical Biotechnology
Published in Firdos Alam Khan, Biotechnology Fundamentals, 2020
A vaccine is a biological preparation that improves immunity to a specific disease. It typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe. The agent stimulates the body’s immune system to recognize the agent as foreign, destroy it, and “remember” it so that the immune system can more easily recognize and destroy any of these microorganisms that it later encounters. Sometime during the 1770s, Edward Jenner heard a milkmaid boast that she would never have the often-fatal or disfiguring disease smallpox because she had already had cowpox, which has a very mild effect in humans. In 1796, Jenner took pus from the hand of a milkmaid with cowpox, inoculated an 8-year-old boy with it, and 6 weeks later, variolated the boy’s arm with smallpox, afterward observing that the boy did not catch smallpox. Vaccination with cowpox was much safer than smallpox inoculation.
Designing an efficient vaccine supply chain network using a two-phase optimization approach: a case study of COVID-19 vaccine
Published in International Journal of Systems Science: Operations & Logistics, 2023
Farhad Habibi, Alireza Abbasi, Ripon Kumar Chakrabortty
The population groups are ranked after calculating their weights using this method. The readers are referred to Appendix A, where the detailed information regarding this technique is discussed, and Chang (1996) as the primary reference. This process is also discussed using the case study data in Section 6. Set the time horizon for vaccinating the groups: After prioritizing population groups, a time horizon should be set for vaccination of all categories. The length of the time horizon entirely depends on government policies, so that the shorter the time horizon, the faster herd immunity is achieved. Herd immunity is defined as the indirect protection from disease received by susceptible people when a population has a significant enough percentage of immune individuals (Sinha et al., 2021). Although societies make their efforts to achieve herd immunity as quickly as possible, accelerating the vaccination process depends on vaccine production and supply capacity. It is usually accompanied by increasing costs since this situation requires the production and distribution of more vaccines in a shorter period of time; consequently, more capacity and investment are needed. Hence, governments usually strike a balance between the time to achieve herd immunity and vaccination supply costs.
A Reserve Constrained Optimum Reactive Power Dispatch in Wind-Integrated Power Systems Using Coronavirus Herd Immunity Optimizer
Published in IETE Journal of Research, 2022
The recent past has witnessed tremendous growth in the application of various meta-heuristics in resolving several optimization problems. The meta-heuristic techniques are modeled in a way to iteratively improve their solution using its intelligence until the optimal solution is reached. The concept of herd immunity to control the COVID-19 outbreak motivated Betar et al. [55] to develop an optimization strategy called “CHIO”. Herd immunity is a state when most of the population becomes immune from being infected by the disease and this results in the prevention of the contagious disease.
A human whole-blood model to study the activation of innate immunity system triggered by nanoparticles as a demonstrator for toxicity
Published in Science and Technology of Advanced Materials, 2019
Kristina N Ekdahl, Karin Fromell, Camilla Mohlin, Yuji Teramura, Bo Nilsson
Schematically, the human immune system can be separated into innate immunity and acquired immunity. Innate immunity of one kind or other exists in all multicellular organisms, including plants. In contrast, acquired immunity has characteristics such as immunological memory and extremely high specificity and uses lymphocytes (B and T cells) as well as antibodies as effector systems. This form of immunity developed late in evolution and it has been estimated that only ≈5% of the world’s now living species has this line of defense [20,21].