The next vaccine hunt will take even less time

The flu pandemic started in 1918 but a vaccine for civilians became available only in 1945. It wasn’t the only vaccine that took years to make, though. US scientists grappled with the polio virus as early as 1935, but the first vaccine wasn’t licensed until 20 years later.Making vaccines was always slow work before Covid. But this time, vaccines are ready in less than a year. This is good news for the future of vaccine development. Here’s what has made it possible...PLUG-AND-PLAYAll the old vaccines, whether for polio or the flu, were made from scratch, and that is a slow road. You first identify the virus responsible for the disease, then find a way to insert dead or weakened viruses into people to train them to fight it. You also need to find ways to grow whole vats of the virus safely (a scary scenario when you are dealing with, say, smallpox). Yet, things do go wrong even with a weakened virus. For example, about 1 in 2.5 million children gets polio from the virus in the vaccine.Now imagine a ‘modular’ vaccine. You create a harmless virus in the lab that can be used as a ‘postman’ to deliver pieces of disease-causing viruses to the body. It’s like the motor in a food processor. You keep changing the attachments for juicing, grinding and kneading, but the motor remains the same. And because the ‘postman’ delivers only a part of the harmful virus to the body, it does not make you sick. medium79510417This modular vaccine concept has been around for a few years. The ‘Oxford vaccine’ made by AstraZeneca and Serum Institute of India is one such. At its core is the ChAdOx1 or ‘Chimpanzee Adenovirus Oxford One’ lab-made virus that has been used to make flu, Zika, chikungunya, Mers and prostate cancer vaccines in recent years, a BBC article says.When the new coronavirus surfaced in Wuhan, Oxford scientists were ready for it. China published the virus’s full genetic code on January 10, and the Oxford vaccine was ready in just over three months. Human trials started on April 23.LESS RED TAPEIn fact, making the vaccine with the coronavirus’s ‘spike protein’ encased in ChAdOx1 took less time than that. Part of the three months was spent on getting approvals and funds, and organising manufacturing of the vaccine. Cut those out and the actual vaccine development takes much less time.A scientist quoted in the BBC report says the idea that traditional vaccine development was a 10-year process is a fallacy. Even with whole viruses, making a vaccine took a fraction of the time. The years were spent writing lots of applications and facing lots of rejections. Speedy delivery of Covid vaccines is largely thanks to bureaucrats keeping out of the way. medium79510032GENE TECHWhile the Oxford vaccine needs a part of the disease-causing virus, the two top vaccines right now – from Pfizer and Moderna – dispense with the actual virus completely. They use ‘synthetic messenger RNA’, a technology so advanced, it has never been used in an approved drug or vaccine before.Messenger RNA or ‘mRNA’ is a naturally occurring chemical that the body uses to tell cells what proteins they should make. Using synthetic or lab-made mRNA, scientists can order cells to make any protein, including antibodies to fight a new virus, without ever exposing the body to the virus. medium79510099As soon as China published the coronavirus’s genetic code on January 10, scientists at Moderna and Pfizer’s German collaborator BioNTech went to work designing the genetic message which would tell cells to make antibodies for the virus. They did not need to wait for actual virus samples. Moderna shipped its first box of vaccine vials to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on February 24 – taking just 42 days to make its vaccine, reports Stat. medium79510129HURRY, WORRYWhile faster vaccine development is good, swift approvals for public use pose a dilemma for scientists, says an article in Nature. For one, companies are allowed to seek approval for their vaccines two months after half of their trial participants have received their last dose. Pfizer is ahead of Moderna for this reason. But a two-month observation of a few thousand people might not reveal all the side-effects of a vaccine.Swift approvals are also a hurdle for further testing. Once a vaccine is approved, people in its placebo group would also want to be vaccinated, making it difficult to measure the efficacy of vaccination. Also, when several approved vaccines are around, who would want to participate in the trials of new and potentially better vaccines?Untitled Carousel 78012690