inactivate

Use of gene therapies becomes more challenging as patients age and grow, because treating them often requires higher doses of the inactivated viruses used to deliver the replacement genes.

Another option is to heat milk to sub-pasteurization temperatures, which could inactivate the virus while maintaining the raw milk cheese characteristics valued by artisanal producers.

With such vaccines, called whole-virus vaccines, a person’s immune system is presented with the whole virus, often in weakened or inactivated form.

However, Prof Pollard says the mRNA vaccines performed better than the inactivated ones when tackling Covid.

While some vaccines use an inactivated virus to trigger an immune response, mRNA vaccines work by teaching cells how to make proteins that can trigger an immune response.