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Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

Although I want to agree, none of the companies started from zero.

All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.

Not trying to diminish the accomplishments achieved, great effort nontheless. Just saying nobody started from zero here, that would have been insane and frankly impossible.

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> All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.

Yes, I first heard about intramuscular nucleic acid injection around the year 2000. At the time it was naked DNA and not RNA in a lipid nanoparticle suspension, but the principle was the same.

In particular BioNTech from the article was founded 2008. This is their first publicly available "product" - it applies their vision for cancer treatment to specific SARS-nCoV-2 proteins (arguably I don't know if they're working on other ideas as well).

They might be working on this particular vaccine since 2020, but AFAIK they have been working on the specific principle the vaccine uses since 2008.

True, but it's the first time we see those technologies in action. Some (many?) of the vaccine projects for example use paths that have previously been considered, played through in "toy" projects that never made it to production and so on, and now they are suddenly standing in the limelight, going live. For some sub-fields of biotech this must almost be like the mindboggling aviation had from roadshow curiosities to a major war factor in hardly more than a decade.

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