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The rapid vaccine
Investment bankers and venture capitalists are used to working 80 to 100 hours a week to conduct their financial deals and acquisitions of highly profitable companies. Not for nothing are they called “courtesans of capitalism”. But locked in the home office, isolated from their peers, banished from airfields, luxury hotels, and golf courses where they can be seen in normal times, and classified as completely irrelevant to the system compared to supermarket cashiers and Garbage collectors currently live a rather sad existence.
The world’s attention is directed to another group that is expected to save: scientists. These are, along with the nurses and doctors, who are now pushing the 80-100 hour weeks to develop a vaccine in record time that can free us from the Covid-19 nightmare. So the most frequently asked question these days is when is a Covid-19 vaccine available.
It usually takes five to 10 years to develop such a vaccine. But this time it is supposed to happen in twelve months. Previously, rather poorly funded, researchers should not have little money. With all the pressure, elementary science basics are sometimes overturned: weighing numerous different options, struggling with problems for a long time, differentiating according to theory, looking at the big picture, avoiding abbreviations and significant risks.
Suddenly, scientists have to acquire the mindset of investment bankers: fast and efficient work under high time pressure, little awareness of costs and precision, they consider risks to be part of the game, recklessly falling into competitive thinking and they show a tendency to intellectual abandonment: The main thing is that the vaccine arrives as soon as possible.
About 100 groups of universities and biotech companies are investigating a Covid-19 vaccine. Much fame and even more money await the first in this race. In doing so, researchers sometimes pursue very different approaches, all of which, however, are based on the same basic principle: the body must be brought to a defensive reaction against the virus and the necessary antibodies (in technical parlance ” immunoglobulins “, which are globulin class proteins), spherical proteins), but without getting sick themselves. If the virus appears in the body, these antibodies attack the intruder immediately, and the disease cannot spread at all.
To reach their vaccination goal, researchers generally have to go through six stages:
- Analyze the virus in detail and find out exactly what causes the human immune response.
- Isolate the parts of the virus that are relevant to the immune response and combine them with a suitable matrix (often other harmless viruses) in a vaccine. Alternatively, use the corresponding virus mRNA or DNA directly.
- Test the vaccine on animals to determine its tolerability and effectiveness.
- Test the vaccine to determine tolerability and efficacy in human subjects.
- Carry out the approval process with the health authorities.
- Boost mass production.
Traditionally, the person to be vaccinated is injected with the pathogen in a way that has been killed or otherwise harmless. The best known example is the measles vaccine. This method has been known to doctors since ancient times. For example, more than two thousand years ago, doctors selected people with a mild course of the disease and removed smallpox from these pieces of the bark to get a vaccine against this disease. They ground them into powder and put them into the nose of the person to be vaccinated.
In the late 18th century, doctors noted that milkmaids were immune to human smallpox after surviving relatively harmless vaccinia. Thus, a more effective human smallpox vaccine was created from the body fluid of people infected with smallpox. The origin of this method can still be seen today in the English word for vaccination: “Vaccine” comes from the Latin word for cow – vacca. The disadvantage of this method: you first have to reproduce the vaccine virus or the corresponding part and then produce it in large quantities. All of this takes too long, given the crown crisis, too long.
“Disguise” harmless viruses as Covid virus 19
The most obvious alternative is that researchers “disguise” existing harmless viruses with genetic engineering means such as Covid-19 viruses, ie. they exchange one or more surface proteins in so-called vector viruses with covid-19 proteins. The immune system is falsified with a Covid-19 infection, against which it forms its antibodies. The fact that the genetic sequence of the virus has been known since early January 2020 helps researchers. In principle, your inheritance plan is enough to develop a virus vaccination plan. Because it contains the blueprint for proteins that the body must respond to with its immune response. The concrete approach is to give the body only the genetic blueprint for the (harmless) envelope of the Covid 19 virus rather than a complete (more harmless) pathogen. That should be enough to allow the immune system to form the appropriate antibodies and thus fight the virus.
Fortunately, researchers don’t have to start with Adam and Eve. After the SARS outbreaks in 2003 and SERS 2012, which were also due to coronaviruses, they had already begun investigating a vector virus vaccine. But when the diseases disappeared, these efforts stopped (the funds were simply withdrawn from the researchers), a fatal mistake, as a result. However, researchers already know a lot about coronaviruses, in particular that the striking spikes of the virus (which look like a crown and give it its name) are something like the virus’s locking mechanism that penetrates into the interior of the virus. cell. This happens specifically at so-called ACE2 receptors in human cells.
Researchers don’t yet know exactly how this biochemical coupling of the virus’s spike proteins occurs. They only know that the virus genome they know is something like the blueprint for it that they just need to understand better. In fact, you can use genetic information to recreate the entire virus or just the spike proteins. It can be used to determine which amino acids from the spike protein connect to which of the ACE2 receptor. If you know, you can recreate these sequences and pretend to the body that this is a complete virus attack, when in reality it is only the small part of the virus that interacts with the human receptor. If you combine this part with another suitable virus that is harmless to humans (the vector virus), the vaccine is more or less finished.
Genetic virus vaccines
Another method, which is also based on the human body’s immune response, is to develop gene-based vaccines directly. Instead of whole viruses, these only contain selected virus genes in the form of their mRNA (“messenger” RNA: an RNA version of the gene that leaves the cell nucleus and migrates to the cytoplasm to make proteins there) or DNA. After being injected into the body, they are said to cause the formation of harmless viral proteins, which in turn, like a conventional vaccine, are supposed to build up immune protection. After vaccination, our bodies make the proteins on the surface of the virus, which are recognized and fought by your immune system.
The advantage of this method: mRNA-based vaccines should be able to be produced quickly and in large quantities. Unlike the other methods, where you first have to multiply the virus to inject it in a weakened way or as a vector (which can take months), you just have to administer the corresponding RNA or DNA.
The downside of this method: It is a very new process. To date, there is not a single vaccine of this type against any disease. Unlike dead viruses or vectors, researchers are breaking new ground here. But this method has immense potential for the future, as it can quickly and easily adapt to new types of pathogens, similar to how a new flu vaccine is made available each year. With the (probable) emergence of new types of coronaviruses, a vaccine could become available more quickly in the coming years and could contain a new worldwide spread of coronaviruses.
Once the potential vaccine has been investigated, only its safety and efficacy should be evaluated. It usually takes a long time. Because the legislator prescribes extensive series of tests before vaccines are approved. But in the Corona period, time is exactly what we don’t have, which is why shorter test series are allowed, sometimes even full phases, as animal experiments may be left out.
But human testing without previous animal experiments is also controversial among scientists. The risks are incalculable, they say. But time has never been as much money as it is today. So you hear every few days from researchers who claim they’ll have a vaccine in a few months.
Swiss immunologist Martin Bachmann, a world-renowned expert in immune research for coronaviruses, stated in a tabloid and highly self-marketed press release a few days ago that he was already able to provide a vaccine in October. You have already successfully completed animal testing. Billionaire Dietmar Hopp, co-owner of the pharmaceutical company Tübingen CureVac, says his researchers “could possibly administer a vaccine in the fall.”
But we must be warned: over and over again, the vaccines that were “on the verge of a breakthrough” quietly disappeared into the drawer. Vaccine development is very complex and prone to setbacks. And you should know: So far, not a single vaccine has been found against any coronavirus. No one knows when the investment bankers will return to their 100 hours a week. In any case, the stock market is already acting as if we had found a vaccine a long time ago. Perhaps not too optimistic for investors?
(Lars Jaeger)
