Table 4.
Advantages and disadvantages of different vaccine platforms
| Vaccine | Advantage | Disadvantage |
|---|---|---|
| Live Attenuated | Good track record | Risk of reversion to pathogenic form |
| Manufacturing capacity | Slow to develop new versions | |
| Risk of infection in immunocompromised patients | ||
| May require BSLIII to generate and test | ||
| Inactivated vaccines | Fast to generate | Need live virus and facility to grow large amounts |
| Long track record | Risk of vaccine‐enhanced disease | |
| Protein vaccines | Safe | Potentially poorly immunogenic without adjuvant |
| Including VLP | Very common platform | Risk of wrong conformation |
| Slow and more expensive manufacture | ||
| Peptide | T cell response | Risk of T cell enhanced disease |
| Poorly immunogenic | ||
| aAPC | T cell response | Requires cell manufacture, issues of scale up |
| Impractical | ||
| Viral vectored vaccines | No need to grow live virus | Pre‐existing anti‐vector immunity |
| Fast to generate | T cell focused response, lower antibody induction | |
| Safe track record | Requires low temperature (‐80°C) storage | |
| Replicating vectors not suitable for immunocompromised patients | ||
| DNA vaccines | Fast to generate | Poor track record of immunogenicity in human trials |
| Safe | ||
| Thermostable | ||
| mRNA vaccines | Fast to generate | New platform: Not yet used in human efficacy study |
| Translation in cytosol | Unstable | |
| Needs formulation | ||
| saRNA vaccines | Fast to generate | New platform: Previously not been in human clinical trial |
| Requires lower dose than mRNA | Unstable | |
| Potential for mass production | Needs formulation |