The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been the defining public health emergency of our time. In Switzerland, messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines were and still are widely utilized as a critical component of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH)\'s preventative mitigation strategy. The development, conditional approval and worldwide roll-out of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 proceeded at an unprecedented pace and presented myriad challenges for manufacturers. In this review, we discuss, from the perspective of the Swiss affiliate of a global biopharmaceutical company, the clinical, regulatory, pharmacovigilance and logistical considerations of making a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine available to the Swiss population during a pandemic as rapidly as possible while ensuring strict adherence to safety and quality standards.

Osteoarthritis afflicts millions of individuals across the world resulting in impaired quality of life and increased health costs. To understand this disease, physicians have been studying risk factors, such as genetic predisposition, aging, obesity, and joint malalignment; however have been unable to conclusively determine the direct etiology. Current treatment options are short-term or ineffective and fail to address pathophysiological and biochemical mechanisms involved with cartilage degeneration and the induction of pain in arthritic joints. OA pain involves a complex integration of sensory, affective, and cognitive processes that integrate a variety of abnormal cellular mechanisms at both peripheral and central (spinal and supraspinal) levels of the nervous system Through studies examined by investigators, the role of growth factors and cytokines has increasingly become more relevant in examining their effects on articular cartilage homeostasis and the development of osteoarthritis and osteoarthritis-associated pain. Catabolic factors involved in both cartilage degradation in vitro and nociceptive stimulation include IL-1, IL-6, TNF-α, PGE2, FGF-2 and PKCδ, and pharmacologic inhibitors to these mediators, as well as compounds such as RSV and LfcinB, may potentially be used as biological treatments in the future. This review explores several biochemical mediators involved in OA and pain, and provides a framework for the understanding of potential biologic therapies in the treatment of degenerative joint disease in the future.