We're coming up on the third anniversary of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic next month.

And though the virus is still with us, the mRNA vaccines have protected so many people

from serious illness and death.

As you probably recall, they were the first mRNA vaccines ever approved for national rollout.

For mRNA, most vaccines consisted of part of an inactivated virus, or part of a live

but weakened one.

Those vaccines show the immune system a sign of the enemy it needs to be ready for.

The mRNA vaccines work differently though.

They don't contain the virus itself, but the genetic information of a special protein

that the virus makes.

This is a protein that the body knows is foreign, and that helps the immune system recognize

the arrival of the virus itself.

Because mRNA vaccines don't rely on manufacturing actual viruses, they're much easier and

cheaper to produce at scale.

Incredibly, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were developed, tested, and put into people's arms

in less than a year.

But if they were so new, how did this all happen so fast?

The people who really took those COVID vaccines to the clinic actually were cancer vaccine

people, and had been using that mRNA technology for quite a few years.

Noradesis is director of the Cancer Vaccine Institute at the University of Washington School

of Medicine.

And the founding editor of JAMA Oncology.

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