Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Medicine Biotech

Celebrating the Path-Breaking Research That Lead to Coronavirus Vaccines (adn.com) 134

Posted by EditorDavid from the stunning-successes dept.
The Washington Post tells the remarkable story of how both Moderna's vaccine and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine relied on a specially designed spike protein partially created by America's Vaccine Research Center — along with messenger RNA, "a technology never before harnessed in an approved vaccine."

And also decades of path-breaking research: If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic's silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases. Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what's possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.

But the pandemic wasn't a sudden eureka moment — it was a catalyst that helped ignite lines of research that had been moving forward for years, far outside the spotlight of a global crisis... Long before the pandemic, [Vaccine Research Center deputy director Barney] Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance. His laboratory partnered with one of the companies, Moderna, working to develop a fast and flexible vaccine technology, in the hope that science would be ready to respond when a pandemic appeared. "People hear about [vaccine progress] and think someone just thought about it that night. The amount of work — it's really a beautiful story of fundamental basic research,", said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [of which the center is an intramural division]...

The leading coronavirus vaccine candidates in the United States began their development not in January when a mysterious pneumonia emerged in Wuhan, China, but decades ago — with starts and stops along the way.... Unlike fields that were sparked by a single powerful insight, [Ugur Sahin, chief executive of BioNTech] said that the recent success of messenger RNA vaccines is a story of countless improvements that turned an alluring biological idea into a beneficial technology. "This is a field which benefited from hundreds of inventions," said Sahin, who noted that when he started BioNTech in 2008, he cautioned investors that the technology would not yield a product for at least a decade. He kept his word: Until the coronavirus sped things along, BioNTech projected the launch of its first commercial project in 2023...

On Jan. 13, Moderna RNA scientist Melissa Moore came into work and found her team already busy translating the stabilized spike protein into their platform. The company could start making the vaccine almost right away because of its experience manufacturing experimental cancer vaccines, which involves taking tumor samples and developing personalized vaccines in 45 days.
The Post tries to convey how meaningful this moment is for the scientists involved. Years ago one BioNTech scientist had told their spouse, "I just want to live long enough that I can help the RNA go to the patient. I want to see...at least one person would be helped with this treatment."

And when the Vaccine Research Center's deputy director finally learned how effective the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was, "I just let it all go.

"I was sobbing, I guess, is the term."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Celebrating the Path-Breaking Research That Lead to Coronavirus Vaccines More

Celebrating the Path-Breaking Research That Lead to Coronavirus Vaccines

Comments Filter:

  • Unfortunately, new is frightening. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Sunday December 06, 2020 @03:01PM (#60800668) Homepage Journal

    The fact that this messenger RNA tech has never been used before is an important part of why many people are refusing it (and going to continue refusing it). They don't trust something this new, and think of themselves as the guinea pigs being asked to test it. They are well aware that it has already passed human trials, but they also know that these things can sometimes harm you many years later, so, they consider the entire first generation of users to be little more than an extended trial.

    Maybe this is dumb. Maybe they are being completely ignorant. Maybe they just don't have the scientific knowledge they need to appreciate how safe this is, especially compared to the risks that COVID-19 exposure brings. None of that matters. In the minds of many, a disease is "natural" whereas this vaccine is "unnatural," and that is enough. Combine that with this "new technology" and you have a recipe for widespread rejection.

    And all that is layered on top of the FUD spread by anti-vaxers about traditional vaccines.

    The COVID plague is far from over. :(

    • but there is easy solution, this vaccine will be rolled out to certain groups first, like medical workers, and then probably to older. Sooo, you'll have plenty of time to see what happens to these "canary and guinea pig" folk... then if things are fine you get vaccinated. Note a handful of bad reactions per hundred thousands or millions is normal for any vaccine including the ones you've already had.

      • Re: Unfortunately, new is frightening. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by NagrothAgain ( 4130865 ) on Sunday December 06, 2020 @03:24PM (#60800718)
        I'm not antivax, and not particularly concerned about these vaccines, but 6 months to a year is most certainly NOT enough time to be confident about even short term side effects.

        Now, maybe there are other risks long term. Maybe not. Maybe in 20 years another disease comes along and really hammers people who had this vaccine... maybe not. I'm personally the type of person who listens to the experts, and guess what the experts are saying? They're saying they don't know about long term effects. There's a fair number of people who will look at this and say that they'd rather take their chances with COVID-19. I don't agree with them, but I can't say that I blame them, and I'm not going to be an asshole and try to equate them to people who deny things like the MMR, TB, or Polio vaccines.

        • Maybe in 20 years another disease comes along and really hammers people who had this vaccine... maybe not.

          Or maybe another disease comes along and really hammers people who didn't... or maybe when you inevitably contract Covid-19 you have long term problems that surface in 20 years. All these maybes.. what to do, what to do?

          • in 20 years vaccine tech will have advanced by mind boggling amount.

            for 60 years of trying a coronavirus vaccine for humans never worked out and never was approved, now we have something rolled out in less than a year.

            so stop worrying, just think of what your home PC was 20 years ago, but biotech has leaped ahead even further than integrated circuits for complexity, new principles, new inventions that were impossible.

        • suppose one in some ten thousands had adverse reaction to vaccine, you'd still be better off with those odds than taking chances with covid in adulthood.

          • Wrong. You have just assumed that the vaccine is 100% effective.

            For all you know, every single person that takes this vaccine will needs another one next year, and another one a year after that, just like the flu, which this fucking is.

            You did know that this is the flu, yes? This is a type A influenza virus just like H1N1.

            SO now, you are fucking claiming that this time we got it different, that THIS time it will work 100% no problems no reinjections... THIS time for sure, right? ev en though its NEVER

            • You have misconceptions.

              This years flu is not identical to H1N1 of previous years, flu viruses wildly mutate. You don't get the same flu twice, a single mutation changes surface of virus and can make it evade antibody detection. But coronavirus has totally different structure, coronavirus hasn't mutated the outer jacket that vaccine makes body identify.

              Vaccine being 90% effective is included in the "odds" I mention, if the vaccine isn't harmful then it's the smart bet. Not to mention being in community w

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by aXis100 ( 690904 )

              You're confident enough to get sweary and hand-wave a bunch of research from very smart people, despite being wrong.

              1) Covid-19 is caused by a coronavirus, which is a completely different family of viruses to influenza. The are structurally different. Relatives of Covid-19 include SARS and MERS, not H1N1.

              2) No-one is assuming 100% effectiveness or permanent ongoing protection.

        • If you have such a hard standpoint, you should probably read up what happened with the Polio vaccine in Africa.

          And if you are on it, do the same about MMR and TB and sent us a link about it. (A I never have heard about a problem with both).

          And as a scientific hint: the new (not so new as the article points out) mRNA vaccines: simply can not have such side effect. WTF, how stupid are people in our time now? Or is it just _uneducation_? As in lack of ever have learned anything that is relevant for your future

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        In fact the priority group may not want the vaccine too. In fact, a survey was done in France and only 80% of doctors and 55% of nurses want the vaccine for themselves (but 85% of both groups recommend it to others...). As for people over 65, only 72% want to get vaccine. These are the priority group. Among the 25-34 age group only 33% want to get the vaccine (the lowest). As expected, the higher the social status, the more willing people are to get the vaccine. Note that for some reason, the French has a h

        • but the first groups won't get choice, front line medical workers and caregivers will be required.

          so, no problem. we get to let them be one last great massive trial for us.

    • but they also know that these things can sometimes harm you many years later, so, they consider the entire first generation of users to be little more than an extended trial.

      Has there ever been a vaccine with negative effects that didn't show up to at least some degree in the initial trials?

      • the oral live polio vaccine that causes some to shed live viruses that infect others, or causes paralytic poliomyelitis (infection along nerves that destroy motor neurons) in about 3 per million cases. The injection vaccine doesn't do that.

        • Sorry, there is no difference between oral or injection. (Common sense: why would there?)

          The Polio problems come from the fact that a huge deal of doses were produced wrong and did not contain weakened viruses but life viruses.

          https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]

          Other case happened in Africa.

          It is a difference if a proper vaccine has side effects versus the vaccine is not produced properly.

          • There is - the injection vaccine uses dead viruses and is administered in developed countries where people generally get a vaccine, The oral vaccine, on the other hand, is meant for undeveloped countries where the minority is actually vaccinated, so it contains a live, but weak virus that can spread to all the unvaccinated people and vaccinate them as well.
            And no, it wasn't produced wrong, you are confusing a single event that happened in the fifties and with the dead vaccne that wasn't properly killed with

      • Has there ever been a vaccine with negative effects that didn't show up to at least some degree in the initial trials?

        That's the thing some people are missing. Generally speaking, this sort of thing doesn't typically show up as problems 20 years later. It's not impossible, of course, but it's incredibly unlikely, according to those who know about such things.

        There are no zero-risk choices here, but it's always a bit strange to me that people who are willing to risk Covid-19 would also be so terrified by a shot that's deliberately designed to be helpful and benign. I think it's simply part of how humans, in general, are

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          They're also the type of people who loudly protest abortions due to being pro-life, or at least that is their claim.

    • Everything new is scary.

      Nobody likes change but babies with a full pampers.

    • if you're scientifically aware enough to know what messenger RNA even is then it's unlikely you're all that concerned.

      The real problem is that the vaccine hits you kinda hard. Not everybody, hell it's a small percentage, but it won't take much to scare people off, especially with the Russians amplifying the noise (which let's not kid ourselves, they're going to, because it's a cheap and easy way to attack us and we're in another cold war with them).

      • It's the same cold war. Putin came right out of the KGB. They just had to pause in the 90s to deal with their own internal political crises, the collapse of the union and all the ensuing problems in the post-Soviet states. Chechnya, Azerbaijan, and a half-dozen more wars/near-wars in states I forget the names of. Still going on to some extent, but now that power has been fairly consolidated back to the Kremlin, Putin has more space to swing his dick around.

        In my year of being a corona-NEET I've spent some t

        • Ukraine? Seriously?
          Ever been there? Because I have, several times. It is crumbling, same as Moldova. Literally, in fact - there is a risk of being killed by a rotten balcony when walking in many of their cities.

          Estonia does ok, Latvia and Lithuania too, to some extent. That's about it.

    • Several Covid vaccine candidates don't use mRNA, but rather the centuries old viral vector. Soo.. this article feels a touch disengenuous by failing to mention it.

    • The mistrust in the medical industry was foreseeable and is understandable when organizations like the WHO and doctors like Dr. Fauci lied to the public and told them that wearing masks wasn't helpful.

      Further, when confronted about it later, Dr. Fauci quote: "When it became clear that the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks,". The problem with that reasoning is that MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, H

      • It's not so much the medical people but the political ones. There were plans made under the Obama administration, to face a pandemic. But such plans where scrapped by the Trump one.

      • It may be true that people lose trust due to inconsistencies but it seems to me that you are asking for impossible to meet standards of accuracy. At the beginning of a pandemic, a lot of information isn't so clear. There is unlikely to yet be a scientific consensus. On top of that, the people are undoubtedly stressed and will make mistakes. On top of that you have many different organizations with different levels of information. Saying that they lied is almost certainly an exaggeration if not an outright l

    • Never used before? That's just false. It hasn't been FDA approved because FDA approval is $2 billion for a sugar pill ... therefore nobody's bothered to try for FDA approval until now. However we HAVE used messenger RNA technology for decades in lab/experimental settings. Example-> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by kbahey ( 102895 )

      Reasonable people can have valid concerns about new technology. That is not the same as the vaccine hysteria that has been ongoing for a few decades without any valid science.

      Here is something that concerned people can do to allay those fears: you are probably not in the first or second waves of vaccinations that will go to priority groups. This means that by the time you have a vaccine available to you, there would be many tens of millions ahead of you that already had it, and months would have passed. By

    • Humans really, really suck at calculating risk (Score:5, Insightful)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Sunday December 06, 2020 @07:43PM (#60801298) Journal

      Humans generally are really, really bad at judging risks.
      We're good at pattern recognition, particularly faces and words that are pronounced very sloppily. We're good at a lot of things. We just don't have any intuition for risk-based decisions. People routinely accept a risk that's 1/10,000 of dying in order to avoid a different 1/1,000,000 chance.

      Covid has already killed roughly 1.4 million people or so this year.
      It will keep killing people, if we're not vaccinated. That's not a theoretical maybe it could; that's our loved ones actually dead.

      Sure there is some very small chance of some kind of significant aide effect from a vaccine. That "could* happen. Not being vaccinated has killed a million and a half. That *did* happen, and will continue to happen until we get vaccinated.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kubajz ( 964091 )
        Also, in decision making, it makes sense to compare like to like:

        * A brand new vaccine - we are not sure if there are any unknown long term effects.

        * Covid 19 - we are not sure if there are any unknown long term effects.

        Oh, and the first option also means no death by Covid.

    • Sorry, no. Anti-vax people will just make up reasons out of nothing if necessary. Their basic reasoning is "if everyone else takes it, I don't have to". i.e. ultimate selfishness. If the tech used in the vaccine wasn't the reason they'd just pick another.
    • Moreover, even if the vaccine WAS risky (it very, very likely isn't), I find it pretty disturbing that we don't consider it a necessary risk and embrace it for the greater good. Apparently we are quite ok with putting a machinegun in someone's hands and calling him a hero. But god forbid some idiot risks his health much less to save much more...

    • A virus that has still managed to kill more than flu, despite most of the planet taking vigorous action to slow down it's spread? In the UK if has already killed more than 5x the normal annual flu toll despite lockdown for most of the time since late March, even a half assed lockdown still shows signs of suppressing colds & is expected to suppress flu?

      Comparing normal, do nothing stats, with stats under active response to epidemics is pointless. Unless you're simply pushing bullshit.

    • Whats worse is that are constantly talking about forcing people into getting the needle by social exclusion witch in itself is a form of torture. (Vaccination passports) If A vacine normally protects the person that is getting it and has no effect on others especially is they are vaccinated too, then why they are so absessed all of a sudden to force you by all means necessary to take it ? Unless there is some extra ingredient in there they dont want us to know about it. Call me conspirationinst but if you t

  • Cripes, thank you science (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dmr001 ( 103373 ) on Sunday December 06, 2020 @03:01PM (#60800670)
    For all the grief we're in with distrust of government and evidence, polarization and dehumanization of people who think differently from us... I'm glad to hear of scientists sobbing with joy upon learning the effectiveness of a vaccine. Especially one that could get humanity out of its current SARS-Cov-2 rut. I think it would do all of us good to spread this news far and wide: scientific knowledge is far more likely to illuminate the world than crankiness and conspiracy theories.

  • Silence (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

    Meanwhile, the press, politicians and scientists all pat themselves for job well done. Accept it isn't because there are studies that show that MMR jab gives good immunity to COVID and people mainly only have bad outcomes because their vitamin D and zinc levels are low.

    Solid evidence:

    MMR jab gives some immunity, (the mumps part, which lasts 10 years)
    https://mbio.asm.org/content/1... [asm.org]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Vitamin D, deficiency correlation with COVID severity
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
    https:// [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Whibla ( 210729 )

      ...people mainly only have bad outcomes because their vitamin D and zinc levels are low.

      No doubt you have data that backs up this assertion too? Don't get me wrong, I'm not disputing the evidence in the papers you've presented! However the most that can be said from that is: Patients with deficiencies of vitamin D and zinc are more likely to experience severe symptoms, and worse outcomes, upon infection with Covid 19. You cannot, on the evidence you've presented, make the more general statement that "the main reason for bad outcomes is deficiencies in a patient's vitamin D and zinc levels".

      As

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Typical bloody internet big head, ignores evidence even when presented with it, think they know better.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Whibla ( 210729 )

          Typical bloody internet big head, ignores evidence even when presented with it, think they know better.

          Your hypocrisy is staggering.

          Perhaps you'd like to review the other interventions mentioned in the video you link to. I'll reproduce them here, given you seem to have 'missed' them in your rush to overstate your case: "All hospitalized patients received as best available therapy the same standard care, (per hospital protocol), of a combination of hydroxychloroquine (400 mg every 12 h on the first day, and 200 mg every 12 h for the following 5 days), azithromycin (500 mg orally for 5 days..."

          So, there's the

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

            Are you stupid, If One group is given vitamin D and the other isn't and the group that is given vitamin D does vastly better then it's clear that the vitamin D is having a strong effect. The treatment that both groups are given doesn't change that.

            How can you look at a 25-fold difference in a double blind trial and say that isn't hugely important?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Whibla ( 210729 )

              Are you stupid,

              No.

              If One group is given vitamin D and the other isn't and the group that is given vitamin D does vastly better then it's clear that the vitamin D is having a strong effect. The treatment that both groups are given doesn't change that.

              Agreed.

              How can you look at a 25-fold difference in a double blind trial and say that isn't hugely important?

              I didn't. In fact I specifically said "I have previously mentioned, and advocated for, taking vitamin D as a prophylactic."

              Rather than trying to put words into my mouth, or arguing against something you imagined I meant, why not address your arguments to my specific, written, objections?

  • I'm shocked, shocked I tell you

    "This is a field which benefited from hundreds of inventions," said Sahin, who noted that when he started BioNTech in 2008, he cautioned investors that the technology would not yield a product for at least a decade.

    He didn't just string people along for a decade (plus), he actually had a realistic idea of when a practical product might be ready. That demonstrates that he had a truly amazing understanding of the technology both the capablilities and the difficulties. It's h

  • Lead (Score:3)

    by Kyogreex ( 2700775 ) on Sunday December 06, 2020 @04:46PM (#60800862)

    Celebrating the Path-Breaking Research That Lead to Coronavirus Vaccines

    It’s “Led”, not “Lead”.

  • Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine: Lots of Side-effects (Score:3, Informative)

    by PastTense ( 150947 ) on Sunday December 06, 2020 @08:31PM (#60801386)

    "The most frequent adverse reactions in participants 16 years of age and older were pain at the injection site (> 80%), fatigue (> 60%), headache (> 50%), myalgia (> 30%), chills (> 30%), arthralgia (> 20%) and pyrexia (> 10%) and were usually mild or moderate in intensity and resolved within a few days after vaccination. If required, symptomatic treatment with analgesic and/or anti-pyretic medicinal products (e.g. paracetamol-containing products) may be used."

    https://assets.publishing.serv... [service.gov.uk]

    • Interestingly I read on science blog that they think the side effects are from the lipid nano-capsules, not the actual immune response. Apparently they did tests with injecting just the lipid capsules and got the same side effect profile.

      I'm sure they will get on top of this as it will be work that will be useful for all future vaccines/treatments that use mRNA technology, but for now it's really not a big deal.

    • Sounds just like the symptoms of the flu vaccine. Nothing unusual for a vaccine.

    • If you do not have any of the mentioned side effects:
      you can be rest assured, the vaccine did not work on you!
      Seriously, is it so hard to grasp what a vaccine is and how it works?

    • Just to preface, I'm not anti-vax and I really want a vaccine to be available to start putting this all behind us. However, while side-effects concern me, what concerns me more is the need for a second dose. Thousands of people streaming in to get their first vaccine dose? How many infected while they wait their turn? The logistics of this are just a nightmare.

  • This is typical of the medical community (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rapjr ( 732628 ) on Monday December 07, 2020 @12:52AM (#60801828)
    So I would like to lay out a different perspective. I am not sure I believe all this, but I have had these thoughts over many years, mainly because I have heard others express them. Think about this rant:

    If you have been around medical people any length of time this is typical of their approach to problems. Form a scrum, work really hard for a little while, declare success, then move on. But the actual problem is rarely solved, they have just made themselves look good with a temporary solution, they have covered their asses (which is important to them because getting sued happens a lot). There has also been a fundamental tension between medicine and politics for a very long time. Medicine has a lot of influence and power over people, while politicians crave the same. When there is conflict between the groups, as often occurs, the medical people always back down, because the politicians control the funding (witness the CDC _just_giving_up_ when Trump starts criticizing them. No protests, no public statements, no resignations, no fiery speeches, they just. gave. up.) The medical people will plead for more funding for pandemic preparedness, but beyond statements in medical journals and a few press releases they will not try to change the priorities of the NIH or NSF, which have historically been run by a bunch of privileged old men with rigid ideologies derived from their mentors in the nineteen hundreds. The current leadership looks a little more diverse:

    https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/... [nih.gov]

    Even worse, a bunch of other old men in Congress who have no medical expertise are also deciding their priorities through funding allocations and laws.

    They are celebrating their success before they have won (the vaccines are not proven to work until they have actually worked for billions of people, for a long time), and after decades of fucking up: "an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance." It is historically a boys club that has been making noise about a possible pandemic for decades, but why have they been warning -us-? They are the ones who should have been doing something all this time, and instead they let the NSF direct funding to fads instead of doing the important, basic work needed to truly solve humanities problems. This was their job in society. Learn about how research is done. There are no big overarching plans to solve basic problems. Instead there are politicians and doctors who have bullied their way to the top on the backs of others and who are making the funding decisions, often based on fads. If your research does not fit the current fads you do not get funded. Even worse, there are few guiding principles for research; it is left up to individual researchers to decide what they want to work on. Research decisions are made by social consensus, your advisor tells you whether you are likely to get your degree according to your choice of problem. Big problems are difficult so resarchers choose easier problems. It is almost impossible to work for 20 years on a problem which you may never solve and build a career. Usually, once a student has their degree they never work on that same problem ever again. The process was so painful they just want to get away from it, and they also adopt the same overbearing dictator-like attitude their mentors foisted on them onto their subordinates. They learned what they were taught well!

    You want to know why people distrust science and may not take the vaccine? Every person who has tried to navigate a skin problem is faced with thousands of skin care products, most of which do not work, and many of which cause more skin problems (e.g., benzoil peroxide which dries out the skin, where is the big research effort into ending acne? Where is the big research effort into fixing the problems drinking alcohol causes? Behavior modification does not work unless you are going to start

  • Wait - based on *who's* work? (Score:3)

    by whitroth ( 9367 ) <whitroth@5-cen t . us> on Monday December 07, 2020 @01:35PM (#60803482) Homepage

    Ah, I see, the Vaccine Research Center, part of NIAID, which is part of the NIH.

    Paid for by tax dollars, and doing basic research which Big Pharma DOES NOT DO, because it doesn't increase ROI next quarter.

    Take your "government can't do anything", libertidiots, and show it where the sun don't shine.

Slashdot Top Deals

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr

Close