Fig. 7.

Potential application of circRNA vaccines. circRNA vaccines have yielded inspiring therapeutic and preventive outcome against COVID-19 and melanoma. Unfortunately, the application investigations of circRNA vaccines are at an early stage. In particular, the engineering circRNA as next-generation of RNA-based technologies shares the same ORF-dependent antigen expression technologies with mRNA vaccine. Attributed to higher stability, lower immunogenicity, and superior antigen-encoding capacity, circRNA can be re-engineered and replace the mRNA vaccine backbone for better therapeutic or prophylactic efficacy. Therefore, circRNA vaccines have promising applications in other viral infections, other tumors, autoimmune diseases, metabolic diseases, cardiovascular disease, and cystic fibrosis, etc