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.

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.

"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.

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.

--IANS

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