Tesla building RNA microfactories to help fight Covid-19: Musk

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Tesla building RNA microfactories to help fight Covid-19: Musk
San Francisco, July 3 (IANS) Tesla is helping German vaccine maker CureVac build portable molecular RNA printers to help produce quick doses of vaccine maker's Covid-19 candidate.
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CureVac's printers are designed to quickly create mRNA vaccine candidates against known pathogens.

"Tesla, as a side project, is building RNA microfactories for CureVac & possibly others," Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday.

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"In principle, I think synthetic RNA (and DNA) has amazing potential. This basically makes the solution to many diseases a software problem," he added.

Pharmaceutical companies like CureVac are working to create a Covid-19 vaccine using "messenger RNA," which can be manually inserted into cells to initiate an immune response.

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CureVac says its mRNA vaccine candidates direct cells to make proteins or antigens against various diseases.

CureVac's vaccine candidate called 'CVnCoV' received German and Belgian regulatory clearance to enter phase 1 human testing last month.

Other companies making RNA vaccines include Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech.

According to Forbes, Moderna is looking to start phase 3 trials by July for its vaccine candidate named mRNA-1273.

BioNTech is developing the vaccine inside of China with Fosun Pharma, a Chinese pharmaceutical company, and Pfizer said they will develop the company's experimental Covid-19 vaccine outside of China.

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--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Insider and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed we subscribe to.)