The potential and challenges of circular RNA in the development of vaccines and drugs for emerging infectious diseases

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a class of RNA molecules with a covalent closed-loop structure that play important roles in the regulation of biological processes and disease genesis. In recent years, circRNAs have become a research hotspot due to their unique stability and biological functions. Compared with linear RNAs, synthetic circRNAs have higher stability and show great potential in therapeutic applications. Although circRNA technology is still at an early stage of development, breakthroughs in mRNA technology provide an important reference for its application. This review systematically explores the promising applications of circRNAs in vaccine development and drug research, evaluates their feasibility as vaccine components and drug carriers, and experimentally validates their efficacy in disease models. At the same time, this paper analyzes the advantages and challenges of circRNA application in depth and looks forward to the future research direction, which provides new ideas for the prevention and treatment of new outbreaks of infectious diseases.