Ebola whole virus vaccine shown effective, safe in primates | Hacker News Reader

Ebola whole virus vaccine shown effective, safe in primates

news.wisc.edu

114 pointsalexcasalboni32 comments

This is the same guy that caused a fluster when he made a super dangerous modified H5N1, to the point that the government asked him not to publish. Of course, he did do it eventually.

Pretty much the definition of being a badass, he makes extremely dangerous biological weapons and cures deadly disease.

That's my school! Good time to be a badger... Also a bad time I suppose, it's 5:00am and I'm still up? Homework? What?

Being a "badass" is something I don't exactly look for when I try to think of who should develop substances that are injected to my blood circulation.

Yeah, I'm looking for a rock star full stack virologist.

I think you can pouch someone from the broctor culture.

So, you mean Pardis Sabeti [0], Ebola researcher and lead singer of Thousand Days [1] [2].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardis_Sabeti

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/ahibadi/sets/72157605798942179

[2] http://www.thousanddays.com/

Well goddamn, you found one.

There's a recent profile on her in the New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/27/ebola-wars

You, sir, just made my day.

Yes, of course that's who I meant.

On the other hand this is exactly the kind of people you wish for when something like the 1918 flu pandemic will happen again.

Sounds like an ideal candidate to be the next Bond villain.

Let's hope that it makes its way through human trials. Even better, let's hope that their development platform generalizes. Lots of known nasties out there which we can dramatically reduce with vaccines.

Yeah it's a clever technique - knocking out the gene for one protein and then producing that protein elsewhere.

> knocking out the gene for one protein and then producing that protein elsewhere

Why does this work?

Probably because once the cultured virus is taken away from the host and put into the vaccine, it can no longer reproduce inside the recipient of the vaccine (unless the recipient happens to express the VP30 gene, which had to be engineering into the monkey kidney cells anyway). So virus in the vaccine can cause only minimal damage because it can't reproduce.

If I understand correctly, the hard part safetywise is not making the vaccine, handling it and giving it to the monkeys. It's the fact that you then have to give the monkeys real Ebola to see if the vaccine worked. So the hard part is handling real Ebola and monkeys infected with it.

What these guys have done is broken that real Ebola into two pieces, where one piece is only in the monkeys. So even in the worst case scenario that a monkey infects a human with "real" Ebola when they are testing the vaccine efficiency, the "real" Ebola is now unable to replicate itself in the human body. It's very clever.

Edit: so I think the answer by k_sze is wrong, but I'm not sure. Is there an immunologist in the room?

The abstract makes it clear that the vaccine is the thing missing the protein:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/03/25/science.a...

Previously, we showed that a whole EBOV vaccine based on a replication-defective EBOV (EBOVΔVP30) protects immunized mice and guinea pigs against lethal challenge with rodent-adapted EBOV.

edit: to be clear, k_sze is not wrong, they tested the vaccine against active virus.

Ok, good that you clarified. I was wrong.

When the protein is present, the Ebola is able to reproduce, manufacturing viral particles that look just like any other Ebola.

In a host cell that does not manufacture the protein, the virus is unable to reproduce (apparently the jargon for this is "replication-defective"). So the virus particles manufactured above can be injected with little risk of infection.

Reading about these tests on monkeys in a biosafety level 4 facility reminds me of The Andromeda Strain. I remember watching the movie for the first time a few years ago and saw how the strain killed a monkey. I was thinking to myself perhaps killing a monkey for a movie was acceptable back in 1971. It turns out they just made it pass out with CO2, under the supervision of the SPCA. It was also one of those strange movies where I could remember the story line but had no visual memory of it, until I remembered I read the book on a commute many years before.

Good news, however the human trial will take years. By the time it is complete many will have died already.

In other words this is good news for the next outbreak

Are you volunteering to be a subject in an expedited trial?

If I was working in an area with Elboa and some risk of getting infected I'd be happy enough to try the vaccine. The risks of this vaccine seem minimal compared to the danger of the disease.

The safeguards and the thoroughness of the trials are there for a reason. The necessary evil of it is that it takes time to be thorough, it takes time to be safe.

Agreed, although I think this is a little disingenuous.

Surely it's good news for the next outbreak, and every subsequent outbreak?

So wait, the delete one of the eight genes that virus uses to replicate itself, inject that into the monkey, and then give the monkey the vaccine and watch the monkey's body kill the Ebola?

If the Ebola can't reproduce, how do we know that the vaccine had anything to do with the Ebola dying? It's not like it can live forever crippled and unable to reproduce.

Generally they follow exposure to the vaccine with exposure to the actual virus and see if the monkeys become infected.

They manufactured the vaccine virus by developing 2 things: a strain of Ebola that lacked the gene to express a certain protein and a cell line that did express that protein. They infect cells from that line with their defective strain of Ebola, and since the cells are providing the protein, it is able to reproduce.

They isolate that vaccine virus from those cells, expose it to hydrogen peroxide, and then expose the monkeys to it. Lacking the protein, the virus is unable to reproduce.

After that exposure, when the monkeys have had time to develop immunity, they are exposed to active Ebola virus. So the earlier exposure to the vaccine virus provides them with immunity against the active virus.

Thank you, that explains the steps much better.

> It's not like it can live forever crippled and unable to reproduce.

(Disclaimer: I am a layman when it comes to biology.)

Why not? Viruses don't have a metabolism or anything, shouldn't they live forever unless destroyed?

The report:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/03/25/science.a...

Do you hear that? It's the sound of a thousand conspiracy theories being launched.

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