I’m going to respond to part of your argument , that the use of genetic based vaccines is something that was foisted upon society as a likely plot rather than scientific and economic reality.
For context, I am a scientist who works for a major pharmaceutical company that’s has significant market share of a certain global (protein-based) vaccine. Specifically I am development scientist working on mRNA based vaccine products with a doctoral thesis involving virology and RNA modifications.
For a given novel virus like SARS-CoV-2 the following steps are needed to produce an effective, safe, and most importantly manufacturable protein based vaccine.
Figure out how to effectively grow the virus in question
This means identifying cells ( or another system like eggs are used for flu, but that has issues beyond the scope of this response) that are scalable, reliable, well characterized ( can’t very well make a virus stock in a cell line rife with latent embedded viral genomes!). This is FAR from an easy task and if the identified cell needs proper characterization it can take MONTHS
Develop a feasible process to purify your virus
Despite cartoon graphics showing a virus entering a cell and Ice-9 ‘ng the place into a thousand more copies of its self, it’s more like someone breaks into the iPhone factory and starts turning out Samsung galaxys. Sure now you have a bunch of galaxy’s (virus) but you also have the entire freaking factory still there. So you need to develop a safe, manufacturable, robust process to somehow filter out all of the cellular crap , inactivate the virus in a way and doesn’t render it non-antigenic, and then also enrich for the actual, you know, antigen. This process will realistically take a month plus for something that would even come close to being acceptable in a first world country
Evaluate your vaccine clinically
See: clinical trials
With a genetic platform like an mRNA vaccine all you need to do is
Identify the antigen sequence
Thanks Illumina
Make mRNA at scale
I’m not saying that this is like making twinkies, buts it’s more chemistry than biology and therefore is MUCH MUCH MUCH simpler. If we had to make a new vaccine tomorrow for a novel sequence. We could be up and running in literally a day.
Package mRNA into a cellular delivery vessel
Again, using LNPs ( Pfizer / Moderna) this is significantly simpler than the antigen purification process above. Think a few days / weeks of development.
Clinical trials
Same sluggish process as above
So to summarize. What takes, in a time of global crisis, maybe a month or two for a genetic vaccine platform like mRNA would easily be 3-4x trying a protein antigen based approach.
So just from that principle it was always more likely for any situation like COVID to result in lots of genetic vaccine candidates with more favorable timelines to protein based ones since the technology had been ready and raring to go.
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I’m going to respond to part of your argument , that the use of genetic based vaccines is something that was foisted upon society as a likely plot rather than scientific and economic reality.
For context, I am a scientist who works for a major pharmaceutical company that’s has significant market share of a certain global (protein-based) vaccine. Specifically I am development scientist working on mRNA based vaccine products with a doctoral thesis involving virology and RNA modifications.
For a given novel virus like SARS-CoV-2 the following steps are needed to produce an effective, safe, and most importantly manufacturable protein based vaccine.
This means identifying cells ( or another system like eggs are used for flu, but that has issues beyond the scope of this response) that are scalable, reliable, well characterized ( can’t very well make a virus stock in a cell line rife with latent embedded viral genomes!). This is FAR from an easy task and if the identified cell needs proper characterization it can take MONTHS
Despite cartoon graphics showing a virus entering a cell and Ice-9 ‘ng the place into a thousand more copies of its self, it’s more like someone breaks into the iPhone factory and starts turning out Samsung galaxys. Sure now you have a bunch of galaxy’s (virus) but you also have the entire freaking factory still there. So you need to develop a safe, manufacturable, robust process to somehow filter out all of the cellular crap , inactivate the virus in a way and doesn’t render it non-antigenic, and then also enrich for the actual, you know, antigen. This process will realistically take a month plus for something that would even come close to being acceptable in a first world country
See: clinical trials
With a genetic platform like an mRNA vaccine all you need to do is
Thanks Illumina
I’m not saying that this is like making twinkies, buts it’s more chemistry than biology and therefore is MUCH MUCH MUCH simpler. If we had to make a new vaccine tomorrow for a novel sequence. We could be up and running in literally a day.
Again, using LNPs ( Pfizer / Moderna) this is significantly simpler than the antigen purification process above. Think a few days / weeks of development.
Same sluggish process as above
So to summarize. What takes, in a time of global crisis, maybe a month or two for a genetic vaccine platform like mRNA would easily be 3-4x trying a protein antigen based approach.
So just from that principle it was always more likely for any situation like COVID to result in lots of genetic vaccine candidates with more favorable timelines to protein based ones since the technology had been ready and raring to go.
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