Innovative universal flu vaccine shows promise in first clinical test
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1118-7
"A chimeric hemagglutinin-based universal influenza virus vaccine approach induces broad and long-lasting immunity in a randomized, placebo-controlled phase I trial"
Even that seems quite readable, as today there's much more awareness what "randomized, placebo-controlled" means and also what the phases of the vaccine development are and what "broad and long-lasting immunity" means.
The title I'd suggest would be: use "vaccine approach" or "vaccine candidate" and just use "passes first clinical test" instead of: "shows promise in" it. And it seems the candidate passed it, from the abstract: "Vaccination was found to be safe and induced a broad, strong, durable and functional immune response"
> Just ask Bill Gates. If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease and immunology. “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start — biological molecules.” Which is why the hacker spirit will endure, he says, even in an era when computers are so ubiquitous and easy to control. “There are more opportunities now,” he says. “But they’re different opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius and naèFvetè9 (sic) that drove the PC industry — and can have the same impact on the human condition.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20110814132419/http://www.wired.c...
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-companys-bid-for-unive...
The thing that was sped up was the entire clinical trial schedule (not the "Sci-Fi" part). Clinical trials are costly, so private companies would normally proceed cautiously. They would take longer on the pre-clinical trials (e.g., animal trials), and take longer to evaluate the results before beginning Phase-I trials. They would wait for Phase-I trials to finish before deciding whether to proceed to Phase-II trials. They would again wait before proceeding to Phase-III trials. But this time, various governments were providing guarantees and financial backstops, so companies could begin Phase-II and Phase-III trials before Phase-I trials were complete.
Just to illustrate this, Moderna's Phase-I trial is still not complete, and will not be finished until November 2021.[1] Yet Moderna began its Phase-III trial in July 2020,[2] as soon as it had enough safety data from Phase-I and II trials to do so.
Long story short, the main speed-up came from removing all financial considerations from development, not from Sci-Fi advances in vaccine development (though Moderna and Biontech's vaccines are using new techniques).
In some sense, we were lucky that SARS-CoV-2 is not particularly difficult to develop vaccines against. A wide range of techniques now appear to have decent results. Influenza is a much more difficult virus to develop vaccines against, because of some of its special properties (reassortment of the 8 sections of its genome, much faster mutation rate).
Yes, that's the huge leap forward made with this tech versus traditional vaccines. It turns vaccine development into a software problem, instead of hardware problem. For instance, we'll be able to rapidly roll out new flu vaccines for the latest strains and produce them on demand, rather than making a guess at which ones will be circulating a year ahead of time and committing to mass production of those.
The Sinovac and Sputnik vaccines are both less effective and have had serious adverse events in their trials. Sputnik hadn't even entered phase 3 trials and they rolled it out. The mRNA vaccines will be the first to pass the bar of FDA approval by a wide margin.
- https://www.ovg.ox.ac.uk/, "How to make a vaccine in record time" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddDiyIKUP0M
- DeepMind effectively solving protein folding: AlphaFold https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25253488; the comment by 'dnautics in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25306088 seems to validate this.
Not to mention the transition from IRL to cyberspace (physical distancing forcing employers to allow remote work; remote schooling; communities meeting online via e.g. Discord, Zoom)
The vaccine was created quickly, but as far as I understand we are now better at evaluating safety yet -- the 3-10 years safety study would still have been practiced if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic. The result of not enough testing can be fatal, see e.g. [0]
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/dengue-vaccine-fiasc...
There is no reason to believe that SarsCOV2 infection has a similar problem (ADE) or causes a similar long term issue - but it is too new to be sure. And if it does have an ADE issue (or similar) it is possible the vaccine will trigger it like the virus (as happened with this particular dengue vaccine, but which can potentially not be an issue with a different vaccine)
And it’s also possible that the antibodies matching the protein chosen will attack another similar protein in the body with some people - and will cause an autoimmune condition. It is unlikely, but possible.
That’s why vaccine safety profiles are usually tested for years before approval for general population. These vaccines have had exactly 2 months wide scale safety evaluation.
I am very hopeful they will turn out safe; but our knowledge of their safety profile is very far from our usual level at the time vaccines are approved, especially with respect to long term safety.
[0] https://youtu.be/fPs90HZbSVQ (Trailer)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddDiyIKUP0Mp - "How to make a vaccine in record time" (2min)
- (video is displayed on https://www.ovg.ox.ac.uk/)
Eliminating the ambiguity means you can (in theory) be guaranteed to avoid the flu for some immunity period. That's very, very compelling, covid or not.
I don't disagree that in itself, its net beneficial
BTW I was riffing on words said inside the post: the post implied there was a burden to getting traction on the funding side to improve on fluvax. I found that interesting because I actually question it: I think there has been no lack of good evidence flu causes economic loss and so corporates want staff vaccinated against flu. Or, that old people in care homes have higher risk. But, the original post said something I wanted to riff on: I think post covid, ANY story for investment in vaccine will secure funding and interest: we're now primed to believe this is "worthy"
I absolutely agree with your conclusion: its net beneficial in and of itself, if we could stop needing the 4 and 3 variant flu shot and go with a viral stem-based semi-constantly applicable vaccine, I'd be very pleased.
We don't know very well how the body works on the higher "interconnected" level of how "X affects Y down the road over time" so preventing it from getting midly ill from a simple flu once a year might end up causing severe unexpected issues down the road.
[EDIT: I see it's getting downvoted a lot: do you really belive that you can just eliminate a completely harmless to young people disease and assume you've done so in complete isolation of all other factors? Nothing is ever done in isolation in the human body, everything is always interconnected and you cannot predict how this will affect the body many years down the line. Don't be suprised if young people will then also start having severe issues all of the sudden that were once reserved only for the crtiticaly ill and very old.]
You're getting downvoted because you're fearmongering based on nothing more than "Everything is connected!"
That's not an argument, that's handwaving things away in a panic.
The alternative scenario here is having those same viruses and RNA inhaled in an active form with lungs helping to transfer them into the blood stream. What are you actually advocating for/against here?
While it is not impossible for things to go wrong, the rational belief is that it will — to a higher standard than most people would consider “certain” — be both safe and protective.
Such a thing cannot be determined easily and effects can start showing after many years of the body not getting the flu.
You belive that it's easy to see how the body works: modern science can tell that only in isolation, but the body as a whole is not something we can predict the longterm effects for. Why do you think vaccines need 10-15 years of testing before getting approved (except the covid one, which tells you a lot about how much they know about the side effects....)
Because most diseases are much slower to propagate than covid. So you need to wait very long to have enough people that got it in your control group to have significant statistical results.
I'm no doctor but I feel like modern medicine can make some pretty darn good predictions.
Besides, your arguments are not sound. If your premise of "the body is too complex to predict" is true, then you can't immediately follow that with a prediction of a long term effect (e.g. eliminating a "harmless" disease will have ill effects.)
I can just as easily make something up like, "the immune system can only respond to a finite amount of disease, therefore getting vaccinated leaves more capacity for future infections." (which is not true)
And no modern medicine cannot predict anything on a global level of the body: if it could then we could've simulate billion of virtual humans using supercomputers and go for real human trials only after that. But such simulations would be innacurate just like how weather prediction is innacurate for more than a few days in the future: the problem is that the body (just like the weather) is a complex system where the butterfly effects becaomes a real thing. So it's not a question of "models" or "compute power": even the slightest devition in the model will break all predictions results in a cascading manner over time.
Bureaucratic delay and running trials in series, mostly.
While I would never rule out surprises, you overstated your case by saying young people would “be stupid” to take it.
When I try to moderate someone’s confidence downward, I find it ineffective to jump to “that’s dumb you’re dumb” — indeed, even being perceived as saying that when it isn’t my intention means the other party does not engage with the point.
Flu isn't completely harmless to young people. Where did you get that idea from? Some strains of flu are more severe in young people.
How about we drill a new hole in the head? Since everything is interconnected, it might do us good despite quite a few deaths from it.
To see how "everything is connected" is, by itself, devoid of content, let's rewrite your comment:
Old people should take it but young people shouldn't forget to do so as well: flu might leaving lasting damage to the immune system We don't know very well how the body works on the higher "interconnected" level of how "X affects Y down the road over time" so allowing yourself to accumulate damage from constantly getting the flu once a year might end up causing severe unexpected issues down the road.
Is an example reporting (google finds more). I didn’t read the original study and don’t know. I was echoing the general media reporting.
(Revaccinatiom may be needed after rituximab, which was specifically designed to attack immune memory cells in case if autoimmune disease - which apparently measles does as well - but the MMR vaccine doesn’t do that. I just typeda wrong word and didn’t notice)