Pfizer, Moderna vaccines for Covid-19 work better in men, suggests a new study

Covid-19 vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are being widely used for inoculation in many countries, vastly in the United States. Amidst the ongoing vaccination drive, a new study has surfaced indicating that these vaccines work slightly better in men. A researcher at Michigan State University, Morteza Mahmoudi has published three peer-reviewed papers where the role of sex in nanomedicine studies has been discussed and how its related to the vaccines developed against the novel Coronavirus. The paper has been published in Nature Communications.

In the paper, Mahmoudi explained how nanomedicines can affect patients in a different manner and why it happens. And this led to him believing this as a factor when it comes to vaccines.

To be sure, both Moderna and Pfizer vaccines make use of nanoparticles that help to deliver their active ingredients to the cells in the immune system of humans. The paper highlights the systemic changes regarding the use of nanoparticles. The study also throws some light on various challenges that comes while researching the role of sex in nanomedicine performance as well as looking for strategies in order to mitigate them.

Mahmoudi’s research shows that the clinical trials of the Moderna vaccine proved to be 95.4 per cent effective in preventing the Covid cases for males. The number is at 93.1 per cent for females. Similarly for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the effectiveness in males was recorded at 96.4 per cent whereas it was at 93.7 per cent for females.

Both vaccines have lipids based nanoparticles and inside these lipid-based particles, the active ingredients of the vaccines are packed. Mahmoudi has now designed an experiment to study whether these lipid-based nanoparticles are the reason for high vaccine efficacy for males and females. In his study published last month, it was found that the natural killer cells in a female donor took up fewer nanoparticles when compared to the male donors. It was this model that allowed him to understand the immune systems of males and females are likely to respond differently when it comes to these vaccines.