What is inside the COVID-19 vaccine?

Hi, my name is Dr. Marta Gabryelska and today I will present basic verified facts about what is inside COVID-19 vaccine. This video was created with BioRender. Vaccines contain tiny fragments of the disease causing organism to induce immune response. They also contain other ingredients to keep the vaccine safe and effective. These other ingredients are included in most vaccines and have been used for decades in billions of doses of different vaccines. Each vaccine components serves a specific purpose and each ingredient is tested in the manufacturing process. All ingredients are tested for safety. All vaccines contain an active component, the antigen, which generates an immune response or the blueprints for making the active component. The antigen may be a small part of disease causing organism, like a protein or sugar or it may be the whole organism if it’s weakened or in inactive form. Preservatives are important and they prevent the vaccine from becoming contaminated once the vial has been opened. It is important if it will be used for vaccinating more than one person. Some vaccines don’t have preservatives because they are stored in one-dose vials and are discarded after the single dose is being administered. The most commonly used preservative is 2-phenoxy-ethanol. It has been used for many years in a number of vaccines, is used in a range of baby care products, and is safe for using in vaccines as has little toxicity in humans. Stabilizers prevent chemical reactions from occurring within the vaccine and keep the vaccine components from sticking to the vaccine vial. Stabilizes can be sugars, aminoacids, gelatin and proteins. Vaccines can also contain trace common components or residuals. These are tiny amounts of virus substances used during the manufacturing, and production of the vaccines, that are not active ingredients in the completed vaccine. Substances will vary depending on their manufacturing process and may include egg proteins, yeast or antibiotics. Residual traces of the substances which may be present in a vaccine are in such small quantities that they need to be measured as parts per million or parts per billion. Some vaccines also contain adjuvants. These ingredients improve the immune response to the vaccine. Sometimes, by keeping the vaccine at the injection site for a little longer, or by stimulating local immune cells. This ingredient can be for example, a tiny amount of aluminium salt. Aluminium has been shown not to cause any long term health problems, and humans ingest aluminium regularly for eating and drinking. Vaccines can also contain antibiotics, which are to prevent the infection of the vaccine by bacteria during the manufacturing or during the injection. Vaccine ingredients can look unfamiliar. However, it is important to remember that many of the substances used in vaccines are found naturally in the body. For example, many vaccines contain salts based on sodium and potassium which are essential for life. People may think of formaldehyde as a man-made chemical, but in small quantities, it is also found naturally in the bloodstream. Compared with the number of viruses and bacteria in their environment that our bodies have to deal with every day, the amount of active ingredient in a vaccine is very small, indeed. Most bacterial vaccines, for example, contain just a few proteins or sugars from the relevant bacterium. By contrast, it is estimated that 100 trillion bacteria live on the skin of the average human being, each of them containing many 1000s of proteins, which constantly challenge our immune systems. Active ingredients of vaccine are the components that train your immune system. It could be live, attenuated or whole inactivated virus, split inactivated virus, parts of the virus like synthetic peptides, virus like particles, just pieces of DNA or RNA. It can be recombinant viral vectors containing partial information about the virus. It can be recombinant bacterial vectors that can produce parts of the virus, or just recombinant meaning changed parts of the virus. There are many types of COVID-19 vaccines being developed, containing different types of active ingredients. Many of these platforms were not used in vaccines before, but they have experienced in fields such as oncology encouraging developers to explore the opportunities that next generation approaches offer to increase speed of development and manufacture. Here are some examples of active ingredients of COVID-19 vaccines. In this example, what is used are antigen presenting cells. These cells were specifically changed to display the antigens of SARS-COV-2. Another example, are the vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer, which are similar to each other, they contained mRNA coding S (the spike) protein that are encapsulated in this lipid nanoparticle. CanSino Biologics and AstraZeneca are using adenoviruses, which commonly cause cold, these adenoviruses are delivering piece of DNA that is encoding a spike protein. Inovio Pharma is developing a new system of delivering the vaccine for electroporation and it is composed of DNA plasmid encoding again a spike protein. Sinovac Biotech, for example, is growing a virus inside the cells and then inactivating it. And this is the active ingredient of their vaccine. And Symvivo is producing spike protein as protein in bacteria and this spike protein is the active ingredient of the vaccine. Thank you for watching with STEMcognito. Find more videos using the search box or the drop down menus above. 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