They spent 12 years solving a puzzle. It yielded the first Covid-19 vaccines | Hacker News Reader

They spent 12 years solving a puzzle. It yielded the first Covid-19 vaccines

nationalgeographic.com

151 pointssytelus44 comments

FWIW: Recent discussion on the female mRNA innovator allegedly sidelined in her academic career. She isn't mentioned in the article either - I've no idea if she should be - but it seems a relevant recent topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623616

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3

TIL. This woman grew up in Soviet Hungaria, and moved to USA.

There is 3 maybe equally important components in the new RNA vaccines:

    Protein: The final product.
    mRNA: the information carrier.
    Lipid bubbles: carrying mRNA into the cells

This article is about the protein. The unmodified virus spike protein is stable only when attached to the protein shell of the virus. These people worked on methods, on how to modify the spike protein so that when it's released alone, without the rest of the virus, it still keeps the same shape and form as when attached to the virus. If you just used to original protein sequence without the rest of the virus, the spike protein would fold into different 3D-shape, and would not work as an antigen. Without this work, the vaccine would not work.

Katalin Karikó invented how to "mask" this foreign mRNA, so human cells accept and use it for protein synthesis. Whereas usually human body attacks foreign RNA vigorously.

The there is the part, where mRNA is packed inside tiny fat bubbles, so it can be transported into human tissue and cells. I think we still haven't seen a submission about this technology here?

this made me curious. it appears the significant advances in liposomes occurred in 1995. i believe doxil was the first drug delivered by a viable liposome product as earlier efforts could not hide the liposomes from the body’s immune system.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01694...

Where can I read more about these technologies and biotech itself? What courses or other learning materials would you recommend?

I'm an absolute beginner, started reading lots of Twitter threads when covid began.

https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1342568484946010116

I don't get why nobody is talking about Ingmar Hoerr (Founder of curevac) who found out that you can use RNA as an envelope to send informarion to the immune system. Is every country just supporting "their" scientists or something?

Everyone working on these things is standing on the shoulders of giants. If your story has hero-creep it would be a book :)

It’s fine to write these focused articles to teach, it’s like analyzing one facet of a diamond. The more the merrier!

We are so frikkin lucky that this research was already done!

Talk about good timing... imagine sars-cov-2 hitting a few years earlier...

Or someone cutting their funding because their research area wasn't immediately useful.

It wouldn't have mattered much in practice. Astrazeneca has also produced a vaccine and it's not an mRNA vaccine. Not trying to downplay the research here, I'm just talking timing.

At about the same time, Pfizer and BioNTech spoke with Graham about using the 2P mutation in their vaccine. Because their work was patented and widely published, other drugmakers—including Novavax and Johnson & Johnson—also based their candidates on the design. Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine would become the first authorized in the U.S. after it showed an impressive 95-percent efficacy rate. Moderna’s vaccine was 94-percent effective.

(at least) 4 of the vaccine candidates utilize the research from the article.

The technology used for the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine, AIUI, was years in the making, and wasn't ready either a few years ago. Again, good timing.

I reckon 10 years earlier would have been the sweet spot of terrible - most of the world still on rubbish internet. Hardly any online shopping capacity from supermarkets. Zoom non-existent.

Is zoom really that much better than Skype circa 2010? I don't use it but there were video conferencing options open back.

Yes. Video conferencing now is seemless, it wasn't back in 2010.

Yeah it’s MUCH better. Skype even now still basically sucks. Zoom made it simple enough for literally anyone to use (and yeah I know at the expense of some security)

Upside - not so many knuckle draggers having access to cheap phones, unlimited internet and limited intellect. All these "anti" movements and everyones-aunt-with-opinion would not exist, which would be better for everyone's mental health.

The pandemic would likely be over by now because we did not have the means to prolong it.

Downside - millions upon millions would be dead.

With no possibility to socially distance hospitals would have been overwhelmed with infected people in months. That would mean that instead of the 1% death rate we see now, anyone who needed ICU or oxygen to survive would then die, which I think is about 5X more, and it would include many younger people who just needed a little help but got none.

Also anyone who needed the hospital for anything else is out of luck. Got hit by a car? Heart attack? Sorry, it’s full.

With that number of dead and infected a lot of basic services would probably fail too just from lack of people.

In short, it might be over quicker, but it would be A LOT more terrible.

Come on. 5% is an absurdly pessimistic and long debunked number. It wasn't even that bad in the beginning when hospitals killed almost as many people as they saved. Young people rarely get hospitalized so that part is nonsense too. Even if we lost 5% that doesn't even come close to disrupting society to the extent we inflicted on ourselves. No, it would not be more terrible by now – it would be over.

Just remember, that "luck" is partially the result of funding the basic and translational research that yielded this breakthrough even before there was an immediate need for it.

The laser of vaccines :-)

Yeah it was excellent foresight. But we’re lucky someone had that foresight!

In a way we’re lucky SARS and MERS fired a warning shot since that’s what seems to hack kickstarted all that research.

Sure, you could choose to believe the wild conspiracy theory that a virus kindly waited for us to be ready to create a vaccine for it before it jumped to humans, out of all of human history.

Or you can believe a vastly more probable explanation: correlation due to common cause. Humans have been paying particular attention in the past decade to this spike protein; some of this research led to a vaccine, while another branch of research led to a lab escape. The conspiracy theory of "luck" and kind viruses doesn't even pass the laugh test in comparison.

We're lucky that Sars and Mers, which enabled much of this research, were not themselves epidemics of this level.

We had an emergency project then luckily got a decade long deadline extension.

The should trace it back to "The Birth of Monoclonal Antibodies" [1] where Cesar Milstein [2] did not apply for a patent for his technique [3].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ni.3608

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Milstein

[3] https://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/exhibitions/mi...

Unlike this relatively new approach adenovirus-based vaccines have been researched and used for over 50 years (350 studies) [1]. An Ebola vaccine has been developed using this same tech.

This is certainly important and impressive work, but the title is inaccurate stating these are the "the first" vaccines. These are definitely the most expensive ones and made for the first word countries with developed and reliable infrastructure able to meet storage requirements. So in some ways they are the first indeed.

1: https://sputnikvaccine.com/about-vaccine/human-adenoviral-va...

Do you have a link to information about an adenovirus-based COVID vaccine developed and/or approved earlier, at any price point? Without such, the "first" claim is accurate and your disputation is counterfactual. Also, please disclose the nature of any personal stake in promoting one over the other.

If we are talking specifically about which vaccines were the first to get approved see here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03441-8

Prices here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/2365...

I don't have any interest in promoting a specific vaccine. Just disdain for skewed reporting. FYI there are multiple adenovirus-based vaccines available (Oxford/AstraZeneca, Sputnik V).

In other words, no, you don't have any links proving any such thing. Your own link shows that mRNA-based Pfizer/BioNTech was approved before adenovirus-based Oxford/AstraZeneca in the UK. Ditto in the US. When you claim that something true is not true, you are the one uttering untruth. Why would you then be surprised by downvotes?

I don't know what you are talking about. Quoting from the first link above:

China and Russia have approved vaccines already, but without waiting for the immunizations to complete the final round of tests in people. Regulators in the United States and the European Union are expected to issue their decisions in the coming weeks.

> without waiting

Not exactly running the same race then, are they? It's a very dubious definition of "first" and certainly not enough to say someone else's claim is false.

P.S. Not sure why the downvotes without any comments. Did I write something factually inaccurate? But then again it's not surprising because vaccine conversation in some parts of the world (e.g. the US) is shaped predominantly by business interests and politics, not facts.

Approval is one thing involving a whole world of bureaucracy. But the Moderna vaccine was designed by January 13, 2020 and took just 2 days. 2 days plus decades of prior research... This was before the first identified case in the US and in fact before China or the WTO recognised that it could be transmitted between humans.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vac...

Oh, interesting, I didn't realize. This is a faster timeline indeed compared to Sputnik V which was registered in May 2020, and I don't know the date for the Oxford/AstraZeneca one.

> Jason McLellan was wandering around a ski shop of Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort, waiting for his new snowboarding boots to be heat-molded to his size-nine feet, when his smartphone rang. It was Barney Graham, deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center.

For god's sake get to the point already.

It's NatGeo - they gotta appeal to their current audience... somehow :-)

Yes, truely this style of writing is so tedious. Informative articles should aim to present the matter in the style of an Encyclopedia chapter.

Forget the writing, I didn't get past the title. I hate this modern trend of making the title into multiple clipped sentences. It makes even the most innocuous or mundane concepts sound like clickbait. So obnoxious.

Please don't do this here.

We cannot be predict what will be needed for what:

> "S glycoprotein signal peptide (extended leader sequence), which guides translocation of the nascent polypeptide chain into the endoplasmic reticulum" - part of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. I don't ever want to hear anyone question fundamental science again. 1/2

> The level of control and understanding we now have over our biology came from literally millions of person-years spent working on things that at the time were obscure and "useless". And now? We can leverage all this into a 95% efficient vaccine _at the first try_. 2/2

* https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1342159339767934978

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