On Our Way to a Vaccine

💥  💥  💥  💥  💥  ---  The next series of blogs that I will be writing about is going to be about the process that science has to go through to create a vaccine for a virus or a bacterium. Because it is pretty complicated, I am going to break it down into four separate blogs. Most of the information that this series is based upon comes from an excellent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.                             [ From an article entitled: "The Development of a Vaccine for COVID-19," June 14, 2020, Page 36-43, 56. ]

The fact that the press, experts, epidemiologists, etc. are saying that the biogen field is going to find a vaccine for COVID-19 in 12-18 months is pretty out there. "The first cases of AIDS were described in the early 1980's; it took more than a decade to develop and validate the highly effective triple cocktails that are now the mainstay of therapy." (1)

What does it take to find a vaccine?

Millions of researchers and hundreds of billions of dollars are out there yearly working on all kinds of vaccines and  yet the F.D.A. only approves 20 to 50 new medicines per year. (2)  With COVID-19 research we are working at record speed. This can be a good thing or bad, depending upon what may be asked to necessitate expediency. 

Background: B Cells

"The immune cells that make antibodies are called B cells. Once they've been triggered by a vaccine to raise an immune response, some of these B cells can last for years and are always staying ready to make antibodies against the pathogen when it is encountered, thereby protecting against the disease for a prolonged period of time." (3)

Susan R. Weiss says, "In virology labs like mine, we try to identify the viral protiens that a vaccine might target, usually the protien that recognizes and attaches to the host-cell receptor. All coronaviruses have a so-called spike protien, which is what gives the virus its corona-like morphology, the "crown like shape," as can be visualized in an electron microscope. (4)

Weiss goes on to say, "To invade a cell, the spike protien attaches to a receptor --- another protien, usually on the cell's outer membrane. This eventually results in the genetic material of the virus, in this case, an RNA protien complex, being internalized by the cell." (5)

Once that happens a person can then become very sick. And yet some people do, some people don't. Why do you think that is? Some people get cancer, some people don't, which makes many people in the scientific community think that cancer has a viral basis to its etiology, particularly cancers like prostate and teen-age sexual transmitted cancers.

A spike protien represents a type of element for a good scenario for a vaccine because protiens most prominantly stick-up outside the surface of the coronavirus. (6)   Because of this many of the aforementioned researchers are looking for gene-based vaccines. These vaccines, such as DNA vaccines and RNA Vaccines, do not consist of the entire virus. Instead, a small part of the virus is used --- sometimes just one gene --- from the virus. (7)  

_________________ To be continued _______________________

Contributors for this Sunday Magazine NYTimes article were:

Dan Barouch, Director, Center for Virology and Vaccine, Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, MA.

Margaret (Peggy) Hamburg, Foreign Secretary, National Academy of Medicine; previous Commissioner of the F.D.A. from 2009 to 2015.

Siddhartha Mukerjee, Associate Professor of Medicine, Columbia University.

Susan R. Weiss, Professor and Vicechairwoman of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the co-director of the Penn Center for Research on Coronavirus and Other Emerging Pathogens.

George Yancopulos, Co-founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regeneron.

________________________________________________________________________________________

(1)  "The Development of a Vaccine fro COVID-19," June 14, 2020, Page 38. 

(2)   Ibid.

(3)   Ibid.

(4)   Ibid.

(5)   Ibid.

(6)   Ibid.

(7)   Op cit, page 39.