Ever since BioNTech and its occasional corporate partner Pfizer announced they had developed an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19, biotech researchers have salivated over the promise of using mRNA vaccines on other pathogens. That speaks to the promise of mRNA vaccines: unlike conventional vaccine platforms, mRNA vaccines can be much more easily modified to treat new viruses. That has opened the doors for the possibility of vaccines against viruses that had eluded immunologists, including retroviruses like HIV — for which researchers are already working on an mRNA vaccine.
