Further discussion on yesterday's article: How many lipid nanoparticles are there in each dose of the product known as the Pfizer / BioNtech Covid vaccine?

Yesterday I published this article, in which I cited a calculation obtained from perplexity.ai which suggested that the Pfizer / BioNtech vaccine contained nearly 400 trillion lipid nanoparticles per dose.

My Hart co-chair

Clare Craig Path

has pointed out an error - by way of this comment:

So what might be a better estimate?

In this article

Anandamide

(Kevin McKernan) suggests the following:

The 100ug Moderna shots deliver over 40 trillion mRNA molecules (14T for Pfizer) and the number of LNPs per shot is reported to be 10-50 billion. For easy math, lets assume 40 billion LNPs. This is roughly 1,000 mRNAs in each LNP.

(The Moderna dose was 3 times the amount of mRNA compared to the Pfizer / BioNtech product.)

So it looks like whilst the number perplexity.ai gave for the number of LNPs might be an over-estimate, it might be in roughly the right ballpark¹ for the number of mRNA molecules.

Whatever, as

Marc Girardot

surmised in this article (cited by Kevin in the above), we are dealing with huge numbers:

What happens to those billions of NanoParticles you've become host to?

Finally, this article by

Washed Up Pharmacist

(Maria Gutschi) is well worth a read if you want to understand more about what is known - but more importantly what is not known - about the LNPs.

The Strange World of "Nano"

1. When dealing with such huge numbers, together with huge variability in every step from manufacture through distribution all the way to the handling of the substance by the human body, I think it is reasonable to characterise a factor of 10 in this calculation as being “in the right ballpark”.