Lipid nanoparticles in the development of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was first reported in December 2019, Hubei Province, China. As on 9th December 2021, severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has affected 266018810 people worldwide with 5265092 deaths. The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe public health crisis across the world. Nucleic acids have been emerging as potential drugs to treat a variety of diseases. Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) have great potential to deliver nucleic acids including mRNAs. The two mRNA-based vaccines namely the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) have been given emergency use authorization (EUA) by the US-FDA to prevent SARS-CoV-2 caused COVID-19 and the vaccines were developed using LNPs. This article focuses on the potential application of LNPs in the development and delivery of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19.