The Role and Impact of Gene Editing on Vaccine Development

The application of gene editing technology in vaccine development has brought new hope for dealing with emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. Currently, gene editing tools, represented by CRISPR/Cas9, have significantly accelerated the vaccine development process and improved the safety and efficacy of vaccines by virtue of their highly efficient and precise operational characteristics. However, gene editing technology still suffers from off-target effects and high costs, and its wide application in vaccine development has yet to be further explored. This paper analyzed the application of gene editing technology in accelerating the construction of vaccine candidates, improving vaccine safety, and facilitating the design of novel vaccines (e.g., nucleic acid vaccines, viral vector vaccines, and subunit vaccines), and found that gene editing technology reduces the pathogenicity of pathogens by targeting the disease-causing genes, which makes vaccine research and development more efficient and safer. Gene editing provides a more precise and adaptable tool for future vaccine design, which can help to respond to infectious disease outbreaks more rapidly. Despite the limitations of the current technology, future research can further improve the accuracy and cost of gene editing, as well as further explore multivalent vaccine construction and high-throughput screening techniques, which will lead to further breakthroughs in the field of vaccines.