New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests
hms.harvard.edu
hms.harvard.edu
Rather the idea seemed to be to stop making more vaccines for COVID - kind of like how we deal with colds now.
It still triggers the immune system, but mutations in any of the major receptors or the like will cause it to be less effective too.
mRNA vaccines, by contrast, causes no viral replication so the virus doesn't get these lottery tickets.
Of course, either type of vaccine is going to place evolutionary pressure on a disease to evolve an escape. That's just what happens.
One side note: one of the things about mRNA vaccines is that they can be very specific. Now, that may not be great for Covid where we would like to be more general. However, that may be absolutely essential against Epstein-Barr where a chunk of the virus looks like nervous system proteins. A standard vaccine is likely to prime the immune system just like the virus and cause multiple sclerosis as a side effect. An mRNA vaccine, by contrast, could target only those sections of the E-B virus that look sufficiently different from the nervous system and prime the immune system without risking friendly fire.
An example of this happening is the Spanish flu, which was a mutation of the common flu that was widespread and uncontrolled with vaccines at the time.
Antibiotic resistance in bacteria is mainly from misuse in humans and animals, and disease spread between the two, along with ineffective waste treatment and the leaching of antibiotics into the environment[1]. About 80% of antibiotics sold in the US are used in agriculture[2], where they are given to animals not to treat infections, but to prevent them and to stimulate growth. Over 60% of infectious diseases in humans are spread from animals, and 75% of new diseases in humans are spread from animals[3]. Shooting a few micrograms of vaccines into humans' arms is nowhere near the scale of antibiotic use or accumulation in the environment.
It's also possible to achieve herd immunity with vaccines, whereas antibiotics do not leave lasting immunity. To be effective, antibiotics must be taken when there's a bacterial infection, and their effectiveness diminishes as they leave the body.
Are these "worries" consistent? Where is the worry that polio vaccination might create worse strains of polio?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638249/
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html
On the other hand, faster replication is also often selected for, which often corresponds to more virulence.
Both trends have been observed, depending on a whole lot of complex factors.
Mutations are random, nothing really is preventing a virus from replicating rapidly and killing a lot of its hosts in the short term, it's just the long-term evolutionary advantage of such traits are small, because killing hosts quickly reduces replication, potentially.
But that doesn't stop viruses and bacteria from mutating into something deadly and killing a lot, or all, of its hosts. However just that has happened throughout evolutionary history on Earth, and even in humans' history. We've seen plenty of pandemics wage war against humans and cause considerable casualties.
There's also plenty of equilibria deadly viruses can reach with their hosts, where they kill a relatively large amount of hosts, but not enough to wipe them out.
I think the only reasonable response to the parent query is to address the core issue ... are there non-overlapping capabilities between "artificial" and "natural" antibodies apart from the speed and health-risk of their development/inoculation. In other words, is "artificial" immunity a better form of immunity in a way that "natural" immunity can never match? If so, seems like a pretty obvious case of "lock in".
Without being an expert, I imagine it isn't a trivial question to answer, as the evolutionary capabilities of a pathogen are a key factor, and well, we're still wrestling with predicting protein folding.
An antibody that dead ends all current evolutionary trends for an organism means that they can’t evolve out of the dead end natural selection has funnelled it down.
So no, this isn’t a ‘might make it worse’, this is a ‘end of covid’ agent.
That’s if the antigenic trigger can be made into a vaccine. More likely what the research is describing is that it is now possible to make a monoclonal antibody that can work as an infusion and is active against all known and future possible variants with the same efficacy.
> Once the virus has bound to ACE2, it must complete a final step: fusing its outer membrane with the membrane of our cells. This throws the door open to infection. Using a novel live-cell imaging platform, Alex Kreutzberger, HMS instructor in pediatrics at Boston Children’s, and Tomas Kirchhausen, professor of cell biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s, showed that SP1-77 blocks this step.
> “SP1-77 binds the spike protein at a site that so far has not been mutated in any variant, and it neutralizes these variants by a novel mechanism,” noted Kirchhausen. “These properties may contribute to its broad and potent activity.”
Questions:
* If mutations at this site are possible, how would this be an evolutionary deadens in a way that the current evolutionary dynamics of the virus are not?
* Surely a lack of mutations at this site, on their face, imply only that there is no evolutionary pressure on the site and its phenotypes, and, that mutations at this site are as viable as anywhere else?
* Or, is it possible that the lack of mutations (presuming that this is very accurate) indicates an evolutionary pressure to maintain functionality that is sensitive to failure due to even minor mutations or deviations in functionality?
* Surely a lack of mutations at this site, on their face, imply only that there is no evolutionary pressure on the site and its phenotypes, and, that mutations at this site are as viable as anywhere else?
* Or, is it possible that the lack of mutations (presuming that this is very accurate) indicates an evolutionary pressure to maintain functionality that is sensitive to failure due to even minor mutations or deviations in functionality?*
the answer is that something that is so highly conserved across so many variations is mission critical. Mutations occur through replication everywhere, randomly. Highly conserved means that a change is a breaking change, severely impacting fitness, if no mutations have been observed elsewhere. Ie to extend the analogy, that point is the 'mountain' SARS-CoV-2 has decided to scale.
I wonder because targeting such a site seems to me like the premise of this kind of research: find “mission critical” highly conserved genes and then clinically target them.
And yet, scanning the paper’s abstract and introduction (the paper is linked in the posted article) I couldn’t find any mention of any highly conserved genome site. As a layperson I may have missed it, but still, if it’s a fundamental premise, I would have expected a conspicuous statement.
Instead, the paper reads to me like one concerned with a novel method for developing new antibodies with new methods of action. Not, as the article states, mechanisms of action against “mission critical” genes.
If I’m wrong, please let me know. But at the moment, I’m suspecting a misstep on the part of the scientific journalism here.
Is the section you are looking for that says ‘this section is highly conserved throughout all known variants’.
The novel method appears to be the the humanisation of mouse cells - ‘The researchers first inserted two human gene segments into the mice. This pushed the mice’s immune cells to quickly produce a diverse repertoire of antibodies resembling those our bodies might make.’
Since that’s all the detail they give it’s not possible for me to comment on just how unique this technique is, because humanisation of mouse white cells isn’t totally unprecedented, so maybe there’s some scientific press release licence here
Checking now the Results section of the paper, they do address how conservative the relevant genome site is, extracted below (emphases mine). TLDR: very but just short of completely conserved. Seems hopeful.
---
> Comparison of SP1-77 footprint to the mutations on the RBD of variants.
When the SP1-77 footprint was projected onto modeled RBDs from different SARS-CoV-2 variants (Fig. 5, A and B), it was evident that most mutations were located outside of the SP1-77 binding site, except for the Arg346Lys in the Mu and Omicron-BA.1.1 variants, and the Gly339Asp and Asn440Lys in all current Omicron sub-variants (50).
The modeled interfaces of SP1-77 bound to the Mu and Omicron RBDs, based on the SP1-77/G614 S complex, indicated that the conservative Arg346Lys mutation would preserve the interaction with HC CDR3 and would not have much impact on binding. Likewise, the Gly339Asp and Asn440Lys mutations were at the edge of the SP1-77 epitope with their side chains pointing away from the binding interface, explaining why Omicron variants were sensitive to SP1-77 neutralization (Fig. 5C).
While mutations near the Asn343-glycan in Omicron reconfigure the orientation such that the carbohydrate projects away from the protein surface (51), such mutations had minimal impact on binding and neutralization activity of SP1-77 (Fig. 5C).
Thus, these studies provided a structure-driven hypothesis for why SP1-77 potently and broadly neutralized all tested SARS-CoV-2 variants through Omicron BA.5.
Finally, we compared the SP1-77 footprint with the new mutations on the recently emerged BA.2.75 sub-variant. The N460K mutation in BA.2.75 was far from the SP1-77 footprint (Fig. 5, A and B); while the BA.2.75 G339H and G446S mutations were close to but did not overlap with SP1-77 footprint as described for BA.1.
These findings made us hopeful that SP1-77 also will bind and robustly neutralize BA.2.75.
Yes -- A lack of mutations on the site is a strong hint that it is functionally important. If virions with mutations at this site were equally fit, you'd expect more variation.
If you don't see some part of a virus ever mutate, it marks a vulnerable location.
This is basic evolutionary theory that has been subsequently played out in both the lab and in the wild. You can't prove a negative but your requirement for reassurance will only be assuaged by furthering your own understanding of evolution on a molecular level, it doesn't seem like anything I could say to you in a reply to an internet post would make the slightest bit of difference to your skepticism and you'd have to get the basic grounding in yourself. The full answer would require 3-4 years of fulltime study, the shorter answer could be arrived at by reading the blind watchmaker and climbing mount improbably, two highly accessible books on evolutionary biology
Or is it a logical reality? i.e. we know the possible permutations of the RNA and from its current state it could not reach an escape branch?
Edit: FYI, my biology is weak but it has occured to me that there must be a topology of evolution.
I think this is fair, even if a bit frustrating that the explanation can't be broken down simpler to laymen.
In keeping with the metaphor though and as others have pointed out in the thread - non oxygen lungs wouldn't make humans super humans, just different and if anything more likely to be weaker than their oxygen breathing counterparts as they adapt to a new environment? I think that is the running idea I'm getting at least.
That'd be a valid question if we didn't ready have non-live vaccines with very good proven track records for polio, hepatitis, the flu, etc.
> Current Covid strains don’t seem all that bad, basically everyone I know has been infected now.
And here comes the covid denial argument. Relentlessly repeating the same loaded arguments again and again.
> Might we run the risk of making things worse at this point?
Yeah, but what about wind turbine's rare earth ? It's really polluting ! And what if climate change has more benefits than problems once we have adapted, uh ?
If that is what you took from my comment I apologize that isn't what I intended to convey at all. I did however intend to ask a question about the topic at hand (broader vaccines) in our current situation which is categorically improved relative to early covid
Be aware that live virus vaccines are certainly not monoclonal antibody injections.
As well, rather than spending your mental energy developing excuses to dismiss, why not think on the subject at hand? You should wonder why this mouse model produces broadly neutralizing antibodies in response to COVID spike proteins while the human immune system does not.
That’s a bit interesting to the subject of COVID, isn’t it? Certainly more so than windmills and politics.
No, I am singling out another comment which spreads doubts and denial by hiding them among good faith arguments. For instance:
> (that the successive COVID variants have proven less debilitating and deadly)
Doesn't mean it's not debilitating and deadly.
> basically everyone I know has been infected now.
And I haven't and neither my best friend nor my parents did. But my brother did and another friend did. Guess which one is complaining 6 months later of symptoms that are not going away ?
> As well, rather than spending your mental energy developing excuses to dismiss, why not think on the subject at hand? You should wonder why this mouse model produces broadly neutralizing antibodies in response to COVID spike proteins while the human immune system does not.
> That’s a bit interesting to the subject of COVID, isn’t it? Certainly more so than windmills and politics.
I believe Covid was and is still dangerous and not to be taken lightly because "most people I know has been infected and successive strains are less deadly" (the last one being also dodgy since it might as well be less deadly for an individual but more deadly for a population if it infects much more people, anyway...). That's as worthy to discuss as the core of the submission is.
It is literally in the HN rules that you are supposed to assume good faith, not concoct false attributions of intent and conspiracy. I did not intend to hide anything, I was earnestly asking a question (clearly shared by plenty others in this post). It should not upset you this much. I apologize for anything triggering to you that I said, that wasn't my intent.
The question pertaining to the core of the submission does not upset me, nor do I find it in bad faith (that one I assume good faith since it's legitimate).
> Current Covid strains don’t seem all that bad, basically everyone I know has been infected now.
This, does. Because it has nothing to do with the submission but all with covid minmizing thrown in after a legitimate question.
> I apologize for anything triggering
and
> Assume good faith - its in the rules friend (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
This wording (emphasis mine) tells me all there is to know about why I shouldn't explain myself to you.
Question: how low does the IFR have to be so we can call a disease "not so bad" without "minimizing" it?
I can put your fears to bed. That shouldn't happen. How vaccines work is they teach a very specific signature to our bodies so it can be destroyed as soon as it appears. . Therefore, any selection pressure would just be to not have that signature. But, since that signature is only valuable because it is recognized, there's no great loss if it becomes meaningless. So no supervirus issues. This is different from overusing antibiotics, because the selection there is not on signatures, but instead a more general "robustness" to the poison (well, poison to the bacteria).
So they really have far less of a grasp of vaccine effects in even that a very narrow situation than you would think. So I don't think you can just put this to bed with a few sentences starting with "it shouldn't happen"!
Whereas antibiotic resistance is something that could develop because antibiotics could be under doses so individuals survived partial exposure or perhaps they worked by a mechanisms which already had some resistance in the population.
It's like, you can breed high lung capacity mammals by having them live in water but you would just kill the species if you jumped straight into holding them underwater for 20 minutes.
Something has to be survivable to genetate selective pressure.
Native Americams had no choice but to go the route of inherited immunity when they began contracting Eurasian diseases. Was it worth living through a literal apocalypse to gain immunity?
So, a vaccine's immunity might not last forever. And?
By cutting down the population of live covid virus particles in the wild, that is, living in human hosts, the possibility of a hard to kill variety to evolve will diminish by a very big probability.
In fact, the new more dangerous varieties are theorized to have evolved in single individuals, who lack a strong immune system, and can't kill a single virus infection for months, and then the virus accumulates changes over these months before jumping onto the general population.
The first observation is false, the second, very far from universal.
Besides which, there are numerous EU member states whose vaccination rate remains below the population immunity level. More broadly, the global chain of infection, and the consequences thereof (preventable suffering and death), has not (yet) been interrupted by a sufficient global reservoir of acquired immunities.
Furthermore, "not as deadly" hardly corresponds to "don’t seem all that bad". Mustard gas is "not as deadly" as VX. Let's not move the goalposts. In the same vein, it would be a mistake to implicitly assume that future COVID variants will be less deadly.
> "not as deadly" hardly corresponds to "don’t seem all that bad".
That is a simply a judgement call really isn't it? We live with all sorts of terrible things. Cars kill over a million people each year and while terrible, they really aren't "all that bad"
I'm not trying to make light of something so serious only speaking in relative terms compared to what we've already been through. Also what is wrong with including vaccinated exactly? They have some level of immunity, that is what counts here right?
>you expressed a common fear that vaccination development becomes counter-productive
That is just false. I was asking if by developing such broad vaccines (as opposed to those that we have developed in the past) if we ran the risk of selecting for worse viruses. As best as I can tell the answer is no, but there isn't anything wrong with asking the question right?
I struggle to comprehend the mindset that allows anyone to think killing a million people "isn't all that bad".
> I was asking if by developing such broad vaccines (as opposed to those that we have developed in the past) if we ran the risk of selecting for worse viruses.
Whilst you were responding I edited that remark from my comment, since it does not lead to a worthwhile discussion. Nonetheless I'll stand by it as an appropriate characterization.
Please read again, I said cars are not all that bad, if you are going to have discussion please assume good faith (see hn rules please https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Junk foods like ice cream, pizza, soda etc. I think can be good but they also lead to the deaths of millions a year (albeit more indirectly). The world just isn't black and white. It is complex and there is nuance.
This discussion may as well end here, because I can have no meeting of minds with someone whose moral compass spins so freely as to wave away millions of human lives on frippery. The only other entity I've had a dialogue with willing to express a similar worldview was GPT-3. That AI was trained on a wide spectrum of human expression, so evidently someone out there agrees with such sentiment, but to me it's downright repugnant.
Source: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
It's less able to spread than COVID so adults get the flu about every 5 years[0].
I'm sure you've heard of Spanish flu by now, but may not have heard of Encephalitis Lethargica [1] that followed it.
Luckily nothing like that has happened again and CFS is tame in comparison. But the flu still has surprises in store for us.
[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
For what it's worth adults get the flu about every 5 years[0]. It's not till we get elderly that we can start catching the same or similar strains more frequently.
Similarly with the cold, which are coronaviruses like COVID just lead to less lasting immunity.
Long story short. This kind of research won't help, give it several hundred years and the number of COVID variants will be similarly broad as cold and flus and people will catch them at a stable rate.
[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
Kids in primary school (aka the local pathogen exchange) will do that.
This common knowledge needs to die.
"Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses and enteroviruses being the most common."[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold referencing a web page that has gone missing and has re-appeared as https://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/ with slightly different wording.
Basic hygiene really helps.
Though you might have unavoidable exposure (workplace, commute, etc) which increases your risk.
I was almost never sick with colds until my kid started going out with other kids. I thought I had a great immunity, it happens I only had good hygiene - washing hands, avoiding contact, rarely going to mass event during flu season and etc.
As kids have poorer hygiene habits, are in very very close contact with each other they get sick easier. After a week or so the father is sick with exactly the same symptoms.
Or if your monogamous partner is working in a kindergarten with kids and brings back home every bug they have.
During the pandemic I started taking vitamin d. That really took the edge off of the flu. I suspect I'm a bit low on that.
Avoiding colds might not be as beneficial as we think.
I know this is might be a poor example but there are old anime series from 80s, early 90s where characters that get sick wear simple masks to protect others from spreading whatever they caught.
That's animated cartoon while in reality, whole pandemic I was observing the comments around the global and "local" Internet (as well real life convos) where people called the necessity of wearing masks as restriction of civil freedoms, and masks as "muzzles".
My sister was even harassed walking by street by some random guy who stopped his car, rolled window and ordered her to "take off this rag from face".
From what I've heard S. Koreans still prefer to wear masks despite that these aren't enforced in public space - tho, the particular places and situations where these are needed still apply.
So I wonder, do the countries that describe themselves as Western differ that much from Asia in term of public health and responsibility towards others, and just really basic hygiene? It doesn't seem to be a brainier to protect oneself and others.
What this means is that your wife's immune system isn't getting challenged and isn't learning about the ever changing pathogens around it. It's not building immunity to the various strains every winter and it therefore can't get any cross-immunity ie against SARS-COV-2 [1].
All we know about the immune system suggests this is not good in the long term.
If true and I kind of hope it's not for this reason, your wife might be setting herself up for a very serious disease down the line. I hope this is not the case and wish both of you the best of luck.
[1] https://www.mpg.de/17434954/0907-moge-prior-exposure-to-comm...
Of course going through it sucks, I am in same bandwagon with 2 small kids and getting often sick with same stuff they have. And they do have stuff basically semi-constantly from mid autumn to mid spring. Half the class has constantly running noses.
How do you think kids build their immunity? You don't get it by just growing up, its exposure after exposure. Protecting them too much from common stuff is one of the worst things you can do as a parent, they will have serious health issues and allergies later on.
The researchers have applied for patents on both the antibodies and the mouse model used to produce them. They hope to see their work developed commercially.
... followed by
This work was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (INV-021989), the National institutes of Health (NIAID Consortia for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development UM1-AI144371, P01 AI158571, Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award GM130386, Harvard Virology Program training grant T32 AI07245), Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR) SARS-CoV-2 Variants Award, Emergent Ventures fast grant, FDA (MCMi grant #OCET 2021-1565 and Perinatal Health Center of Excellence project grant #GCBER005), the Danish Technical University and SANA, and IONIS.
[sarcasm] Let me guess, $50,000 per dose MRNA vaccine that makes you immune to COVID, thanks for the grants suckers. [/sarcasm]
This is something that really annoys me (obviously) and I think it would make a lot of sense if "any patents arising from research done with monies given by <x> will confer on <x> a lifetime perpetual non-exclusive right to use and re-license said patent on what ever terms they deem acceptable."
It won't happen of course, but it should in my opinion.
If this were implemented, wouldn't it just be the case that no one would take your money?
And to be clear, I don't expect this situation to change any time soon. Just annoyed by it.
If you feel you have an understanding of the system I'm criticizing, why not help me understand why it has to be this way? I get it if you don't have the time or inclination to do so, but surprisingly I'm actually really open to learning new things and it would be appreciated not only by me but by other people reading your comments if you could explain the current system, perhaps other systems that have been tried and failed, and perhaps compare it with other systems (if they exist) that don't do it this way (giving the IP to the university even though it might be considered, by some less knowledgeable people, to be a 'work for hire.' Where it would seem that the agencies providing grants are doing the hiring.
Always ready to listen an learn new things.
Perhaps there is some negotiation already going on for grant moneys, I would expect so if any grants were sizable, I mean if I am giving you a million dollars to study something I might say before hand these are my requirements and you would probably say yes or no, but maybe some grants were much less in size and involved things like use of facilities. In those cases it would be much more likely to change your value estimation of the grant and maybe refuse because not worth it, but if not worth it less stuff gets made and at some point we are the things working worse than before because some researchers would be like screw this academic career I can just go be a quant somewhere.
I mean as I understand it being a scientist is not exactly really rewarding https://www.zippia.com/scientist-jobs/salary/ so I would probably not want to do anything that made it potentially less (financially) rewarding because while people also do things for the good of humanity and so forth at some point when you're eating your Top Ramen with your disgusting room-mates maybe you might be tempted to change your life course for something with increased comfort.
The problem is generally that public funding accounts for extremely small amounts of the funding that it requires to take a drug to market. I didn't lookup any numbers for this, but I would guess it's very rarely above 1%.
The government could try to claim some share of the profits from drugs derived from research that was partially grant funded, but that seems logistically very difficult and not worth it. The government already gets a share through various taxes anyways.
The purpose of public research is to encourage innovation, which in turn benefits everyone. Private companies usually have no incentive to make any of their research public which can lead to many places repeating the same things.
[1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies/food-and-drug-admin...
We could have many compounds out there that don't do anything for their intended target but aren't actively harmful
The type of comment that you left is a pattern I have been noticing where someone will state that they don't understand something and then proceed to criticize it.
This does not make sense to me, as I don't understand how someone can assume they have legitimate criticisms of a system without first asking clarifying questions to improve their understanding.
Also, who's to say that Pfizer can't make an additional deal, or funding, for this effort?
Either way, making the results of research that has already been funded by charities, the state etc public should be mandatory, and would still leave these companies with plenty of profits.
> would still leave these companies with plenty of profits.
Development is undertaken with risk capital. “Plenty of profits” is not the bar; the returns must exceed those found elsewhere for the same level of risk. Otherwise new drugs are simply not developed.
The thread was about "why would Pfizer pay for R&D if the vaccine/antibody could then simply be relincesed".
And the answer is: because they can sell the vaccine for more money than it costs to research a new one.
If they have to pay extra to develop, then they still have a huge moat. Even if Moderna or J&J is also licensed to produce the same vaccine, Moderna will also have to pay the same cost before they can have a product, so no change in incentives compared to today.
This whole "but then who pays for development" is a red herring you've thrown in.
And in general, the bottom line is this: if a piece of research, be it basic research or clinical trials or anything else is mainly funded from public money, then it should belong to the public, not to the corporation that was payed to execute the study. The corporation has already gotten paid for the R&D in this scenario, so it's fair for the public to license that R&D to other corps as well, and allow all corps to compete on price of the finished good. If this research stops at the molecule, then let various corps compete on turning the same molecule into a finished product, and let them patent the finished drug, but not the molecule itself.
That seems... a spectacularly naïve idea.
Governments could have done this for fifty years, but by and large they don't, because governments are generally capricious and short termist, and don't value R&D.
Heck, the UK government just sold off it's vaccine development centre even after Covid happened. https://researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-innovation-2...
Why these diseases are serious enough to lock us all in our fucking homes but yet rampant profiteering is allowed is a travesty. The entire state and industry hand in hand, defacto fascism.
Now, if by "development" you mean the cost of mass manufacturing and marketing the substance, then every company that wants to manufacture it can find their own, which will be payed for by, you know, sales.
Here’s an accessible overview from the CBO: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126
Cake and eat it.
On the other hand, you may have invented a novel type of hammock which is neat but has no social function, so, by all means have a quarter of a century of monopoly on that.
There is a scheme in the pharmacy market for shifting patents to prevent generics from being produced, that scheme would be outlawed if we had the right mix of legislators in Congress (basically fewer people who are dependent on these pharmaceutical companies for campaign funds and PAC support). But the original patents do expire, the trick is convince folks that they don't do what they do as well as the new thing does what it does.See here[2] if you want the boring details.
[1] I've got a bit over a dozen patents that arose out of work I've done for others and ended up becoming very familiar with them, even get the occasional expert witness work when trolls need to be disabused.
Edit: was not is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplementary_protection_certi... (I haven't checked this link).
I think people are under the impression that the government is giving like 75% of the funding for drug development. It’s more like 1%. Getting FDA approval is a very arduous and expensive process. If you want to build an insulin factory, you’re looking at 8-10 years and $100 million to prove to the government that your insulin is safe to use. [1] That’s just for making generic insulin. Developing a new drug from scratch and getting it approved is orders of magnitude harder. A 6 month monopoly wouldn’t be close enough to recoup your costs.
[1]: https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20190405....
Probably the biggest immediate positive impact would be automatically securing the rights to produce and distribute the patented good in developing nations. BigCo isn’t making much money there anyway.
[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/The_Nestlé_Inf...
Making some money sure, but developing nations are not great consumer markets and BigCo isn’t making a big chunk of its profit there. It ought to be possible for BigCo to be made to accept the loss of a market they probably would neglect anyway (especially pharma) in exchange for R&D funding to give legal clearance for other organizations to serve those populations.
Real question for you and others: Where do we draw the line? That is an enormously complex question!
I have an equivalent to discuss: During the COVID-19 crisis, I was bothered that the South Africa gov't was pushing so hard to get access to produce vaccines locally without paying patent licensing costs. (Without very advanced pharma manuf facils, it would be useless. Many people under estimate the complexity of producing these new mRNA vaccines, let alone distributing them safely and correctly.) South Africa is, by many measures, a middle income economy. They could absolutely affort 10-20 USD per citizen to vaccinate their population -- not so different than what EU paid for vaccines. Please do not interpret this post as "dumping on SA"!. I just want to discuss a very specific example.
Related: The Serum Institute of India (which I think is the world's largest producer by vaccine doses) eventually secured a licenses to produce and sell vaccines. (Wiki tells me three were licensed [very impressive!]: AstraZeneca/Oxford, Novavax, and Russia's Gamaleya Sputnik V.) Does anyone know the details of SI's licensing agreements?
[0] unless the lab-gnerated antibody is "seeing" a different part of the virus that the current vaccine doesn't see, in which case targeting the new spot in the virus is an obvious "next move".
“If it does,” he added, “it might provide a new therapeutic and also contribute to new vaccine strategies.”
Maybe you know, is this just for therapeutics and not vaccines?
Edit: looks like someone else answered this below....
One of the papers I read compared and contrasted the antibody that Pfizer used in their development vs the one that Moderna used in their development, with the conclusion that the Moderna "provoked" antibody was slightly more effective at preventing an infection from taking hold.
And based on that understanding (which may be flawed, please let me know if it is) then having a better 'target' antibody that you are trying to provoke the immune system to create, would make an MRNA vaccine more effective.
And you're mad because when the government funded 0.01% of the total cost of development you can't get it for free?
That’s also discounting the fact that they aren’t paying for all the projects that don’t make it to the “works in a lab” stage. That a significant chunk of risk that they aren’t exposed to.
You can just look at the budget of the NIH versus private and corporate investment in drug development. What the government spends is a fraction of what private companies invest.
To get a drug approved you're looking at $5k-$15k/person/year in a Phase 3 trial (depending on the monitoring needed). You can call up an CRO and ask for a quote. I did this several jobs ago.
Just to give you a sense, the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine was 47,000 patients [1]. These patients were followed for 2 years. For a rough estimate, that's $5,000 x 47,000 x 2 years = $470M.
Half a billion dollars, just for one clinical trial.
That's already 3 orders of magnitude larger than a typical $500,000 grant for basic lab research like this paper.
And that's just the clinical trials. It doesn't include the trials leading up to the pivotal trial, the manufacturing development costs, the health authority submissions costs across 130 countries, etc. Then add on top the cost to make the actual drug and put it in a vial and ship it around the world.
And sure, "they aren’t paying for all the projects that don’t make it to the “works in a lab” stage". But conversely, the government never bears the risk for later development that fails. I remember Pfizer a couple decades ago spent $1B on a new manufacturing plant for a drug that never got approved.
[1]https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/about-our...
Jokes aside, I feel the public has become indifferent to covid, I doubt this antibody will have a good commercial prospect
There's a certain amount of variation in the population. More fit genes are more common.
If there's other variations of this portion of the spike protein out there, they're almost certainly less fit than the overwhelmingly predominant type. Maybe if the predominant type is severely attenuated by vaccine these will get more chance to replicate and become a bit fitter, but there's no guarantee they climb up to parity with the "old design".
But, if any (survivable) variations do exist, their survival advantage would grow tremendously once this antibody saw widespread use in treatments, which would lead to the variations likely becoming dominant quite rapidly thereafter.
Still, there's no reason not to keep searching and studying. We may be able to make an effective treatment based on this.
Like I was under the impression that there were relatively few novel configurations that it could evolve into which would evade vaccines, meaning that in theory a couple rounds of vaccines would be enough to beat it.
Antibody treatments are apparently a whack a mole game where they're constantly getting out of date and ineffective as we allow the virus to keep spreading and mutating.
But yes, once we know it's safe sign me up too