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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

#31

Post by tzs »

The layman's explanation I've seen about how these mRNA vaccines work is that they get some of your cells to manufacture a protein that is characteristic of the virus, which the cells release and the immune system takes care of.

Then later if you get the virus, the immune system already recognizes that protein and takes care of the virus.

Question: why do we need to have our cells make the protein? Couldn't we synthesize and distribute the protein itself and inject that?

Question 2: what happens to the cells that take in the mRNA and make the protein? Do they just make a certain amount of it, then go back to normal?

Or do they keep making it for the lifetime of the cell, and stop doing whatever that cell is normally supposed to do?

Or do they get killed doing this, much like if they were infected by the virus (except, of course, that unlike the with the virus, what they are making is not viral, so the maximum number of cells that would be killed making the protein is equal to the number of mRNA strands in the injection)?

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

#32

Post by djsumdog »

Big pharma companies have wanted mRNA vaccines for years. Others have been developed and even gone through trails that never got approved for markets.

There are also trials for therapeutics such as inhaled steroids; something doctors in certain regions have been prescribing off-label for months and claim to have very high success rates. Yet organizations like the NIH are saying they shouldn't be used until the trials/studies are done... and they've been saying that since August.

Honestly, I'd rather more effort be put into seeing if existing therapeutics can be used to reduce the effects of moderate/severe COIVD.

Let's face it. The drug companies got millions just to attempt to develop these vaccines, many of those attempts which will be failures. They don't care. They already have tax payer money from countries all around the world. This is a push to the first mRNA vaccine out, so the Gavi Health Alliance can start pushing more of them.

There is a huge money incentive we're ignoring. It's not on this particular vaccine; it's on all the future vaccines--some which have already been developed and never made it through all their trails/approved--and the billions they stand to make from them.

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

#33

Post by superbaconman »

api wrote: post #4
andyv wrote: post #3

The great thing is that the next time this happens, a vaccine can be created equally quickly.

Maybe... depends on the virus. This won’t work for things like HIV or rapidly mutating viruses. It will probably work for any relative coronaviruses

Actually, Moderna is working on an hiv vaccine using similar tech. Sounds like they're pretty early on in testing though.

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

#34

Post by aazaa »

> They identified the sequence for the spike protein, plugged that into their vaccine platform, and voila – an mRNA vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Moderna zeroed in on the spike protein thanks th large amount of previous research on SARS-CoV-1. Vaccines effective in animal models of SARS were developed based on this approach starting around 2004:

https://www.pnas.org/content/101/17/6641

The article continues:

> The win-win here, however, is that the more we develop a universal vaccine platform, the more we can have the best of both worlds – fast plus safe and effective. But this also means we need public buy in, which requires reassuring the public about the process and the strategy. It also means reassuring the public that the process has not been politicized, and that objective experts are driving (something the TA did poorly).

The MRNA approach requires an understanding of viral vulnerabilities and a lot of animal studies prior to the synthesis of a vaccine candidate. Again, that seemingly fruitless work with SARS more than a decade ago was the key to the success of Moderna and Pfizer today.

It's a lesson that should not be forgotten but probably will.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the Pfizer and Moderna approvals represent the first ever large-scale use of MRNA vaccines in humans. That substantially lowers the barrier to entry of new vaccines based on the same platform.

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

#36

Post by shdon »

The article say that they spent a decade of research on mRNA vaccines before. That was obviously well before anybody knew about SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19. Does this mean that the research basically was about creating sort of like a "template" vaccine that can then be specialised or programmed with the specifics of the thing you're trying to vaccinate against?

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

#37

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

There are these 2 quotes from the article that I think are a little too "handwavy" over potential real problems for the future:

> Since the platform itself is pre-tested, we won’t need to do months of testing before distribution. Still, we may need to do some testing on the specific vaccine. Perhaps much of this testing can be done with computer modeling, and some with animal testing.

and

> The question ultimately comes down to risk vs benefit. We need to get over our evolved but suboptimal instinct to avoid directly causing harm preferentially over passively allowing harm to occur. In the end, the amount of harm is all that matters. In a situation like this, delivering a vaccine as quickly as possible while maintaining sufficient safety and efficacy, there is a sweet spot somewhere that minimizes disease, death, and disruption. We want that sweet spot, even it if means delivering a vaccine that has not been tested as much as we would like. It would mean accepting more risk form the vaccine in order to reduce risk from the pandemic.

Think of the crazy amount (highlight on the crazy) of opposition you have to vaccines now. Imagine if you get one vaccine with just a slightly higher amount of negative reactions, and even a few deaths that were clearly vaccine-caused, due to rushing the approval process. You will have set back public health decades.

Look at covid: its fatality rate is actually quite low, well well below 1%. If we give the vaccine to everyone, you need to have extremely low adverse reactions for it to be a net positive because we're giving it to so many people.

I feel that these types of articles that argue "We need to get over our fundamental human irrationality" are pointless, because we are, after all, human.

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

#38

Post by fat-chunk »

tialaramex wrote: post #18
kemiller2002 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the silver lining for this pandemic. Covid-19 is lethal, I'm not discounting that, but in terms of real lethality, this was a good test run to show that this approach works. (At least in my lay person's knowledge.) What really scares me are the highly lethal flu strains (I think H5N5?) The fact that we can produce a vaccine this quickly now gives me hope when we encounter a scenario like out of the mo…

High lethality is often associated with reduced transmissibility. Which makes sense - dead people certainly aren't going to cough on you. In a Sci Fi movie maybe the virus has a long delay, you're infectious for a month with no symptoms, then drop dead in seconds. But in the real world that's less likely the more extreme it gets. One thing that did make this virus more dangerous was that many humans became infectious…

It makes me wonder how the world would cope today with a Bubonic Plague or Spanish Flu, those two I reckon would probably be more similar to your hypothetical Sci-Fi disease.

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

#39

Post by sp332 »

aazaa wrote: post #34

> They identified the sequence for the spike protein, plugged that into their vaccine platform, and voila – an mRNA vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Moderna zeroed in on the spike protein thanks th large amount of previous research on SARS-CoV-1. Vaccines effective in animal models of SARS were developed based on this approach starting around 2004: https://www.pnas.org/content/101/17/6641 The article continues:…

I understand why they went for the spike protein first, but now maybe they could try for something more generic, against all coronaviruses?

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

#40

Post by unchocked »

Yes. We need accelerated testing. In the case of a pandemic, we need to make better use of volunteers. I believe that as the history of this one is reckoned with, one of the more interesting moral failures to be acknowledged will be the failure to utilize challenge testing protocols with willing volunteers (give them the vaccine and then deliberately expose them to the virus. It is a calculated risk.)

Earlier phases could have been accelerated as well. For mRNA vaccines, deleterious effects are unlikely, inefficacy is the likeliest problem. It might be possible to be challenge testing (highly informed) volunteers within a week of a novel virus being isolated.

On a similar note, national stockpiles of RT-PCR machines and reagents would allow widespread testing within the same week.

If I’m right, these indicate moral failures deeply embedded within our political and medical systems. Better luck next time.

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