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It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

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Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#21

Post by parsimo2010 »

No, it took years to develop the vaccine. Luckily they started on it before they even knew whether there would be a big payoff. Otherwise we wouldn't have either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.

I'm generally against pharmaceutical companies charging ridiculous prices for their drugs, but we've benefited from the fact that they use this money to pursue risky research opportunities. If the chance at a big payoff wasn't there, big pharma might not have had this in the hopper. Government funding alone probably can't incentivize pharma to continue pursuing long-shot bets at their current level. Now I have to think about which option I would prefer- cheaper prescriptions or a better chance at being prepared for catastrophic events.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#22

Post by DalasNoin »

ballenf wrote: post #13

Just curious -- would it be that much harder to develop a vaccine that was itself contagious? Recipients would expel the vaccine in their own respiration?

There is a vaccine against polio that can infect and immunize others. It uses a live polio virus genetically modified to not cause severe disease.

"The OPV is less expensive and easier to administer, and can spread immunity beyond the person vaccinated, creating contact immunity. It has been the predominant vaccine used. However, under conditions of long-term vaccine virus circulation in under-vaccinated populations, mutations can reactivate the virus..."

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#23

Post by tehjoker »

causality0 wrote: post #6

I wonder if any, or if many, Moderna employees have been walking around off-the-books immunized since January. I know I would've been tempted.

Probably not since January, but maybe after the phase 1 trials and the dosing schedule was figured out. To be honest, if it doesn't come out that they were using it off the books, either they're suckers or we are.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#24

Post by tzs »

Suppose an mRNA vaccine is developed for some virus, but it fails to clear phase 1 safety testing.

Question: what would be the likely reasons for that? In particular, is it almost certainly going to be due to whatever carries the mRNA, or could the mRNA itself be the problem?

If it is the carrier in which potential safety issues lie, does that mean that once we have one successful safe mRNA vaccine for virus A, then when some new virus B comes along an mRNA vaccine for B that uses the same carrier is going to be as safe as the vaccine for virus A?

If so, does that mean for future new viruses, the mRNA approach will let us go right into effectiveness testing, skipping phase 1 safety testing?

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#25

Post by fabian2k »

I think the title alone might be a bit misleading, I'd rather state it as "it tooks two days to develop a vaccine candidate". The mRNA vaccine method does mean that you can design a vaccine this quickly, just based on the sequence and some general knowledge about the virus. But what you don't from this are safety and efficacy, you still have to determine those the hard way. Which the article of course also mentions at length.

As far as I know Moderna and Biontech tried different variants of their vaccine. And to determine how well those work you have to do some animal experiments, and that is always much slower than designing and synthesizing mRNA sequences.

The mRNA vaccines were the fastest ones, and they worked better than expected. So I think there is a lot of promise in the technology, but further speedups are hard because they're in the clinical study part.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#26

Post by cwp »

ballenf wrote: post #13

Just curious -- would it be that much harder to develop a vaccine that was itself contagious? Recipients would expel the vaccine in their own respiration?

Interesting. That's not a vaccine anymore that's a strain of SARS-CoV-2 that's never produces symptoms, but is still similar enough to the original to prime the immune system. Presumably it would out compete the original in a Darwinian sense, because people who caught it would never get sick and stay home.

Risky, though, because if it turns out to be less benign than we thought - or mutates in such a way as to become lethal - we've just started a second pandemic.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#30

Post by megaman821 »

melling wrote: post #2

The technology was years in the making. DARPA was also involved. “In October 2013, DARPA awarded Moderna up to approximately $25 million to research and develop potential mRNA medicines as a part of DARPA’s Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics, or ADEPT, program”

Sure, and that website I made in 24 hours was only possible because of DARPA's funding of the first Internet and decades of efforts into programming languages, etc.

The point being, if a novel deadly virus was discovered tomorrow, how fast could Moderna develop a potential vaccine?

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