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The agenda for mRNA researchers now is to keep making the technology better and broader--for instance by going after vaccines for HIV, and creating new ways to treat diseases. It may be possible to create a single mRNA vaccine that gives protection against several pathogens, rather than just one. And if we can find additional sources for the raw materials involved in making mRNA vaccines, their prices will go down. In future outbreaks, we'll be measuring the time between the first case and the first vaccine candidate not in years or months, but in weeks. And mRNA will almost certainly be the technology that makes this possible. *** If mRNA vaccines are the cool new kid on the block, viral-vectored vaccines are the equally cool kid who doesn't get quite as much attention because her family moved in a few years earlier. Like mRNA, the viral-vectored approach was the subject of years of research and only recently produced vaccines that could be used in people. It works by delivering the spike or other target protein that your immune system needs to recognize as foreign. The delivery mechanism is a version of another virus--such as one that causes the common cold--that has been modified so it's harmless to humans; this virus, the carrier of the surface protein that the immune system will learn to make antibodies for, is what's known as the vector. If you got a vaccine manufactured by Johnson & Johnson or Oxford/AstraZeneca, if you got Serum Institute of India's Covashield, you got a viral-vectored dose. Although making the surface protein is harder than making the mRNA, these vaccines were still developed very quickly; the first two COVID vaccines that used viral vectors reached the market in just fourteen