How to make a coronavirus vaccine

The coronavirus pandemic may look like a horror movie—an invisible enemy that kills millions and shuts down society, Reduce vibrant communities to ghost towns — However, it is important to remember that the virus itself is not some supernatural monster. It survives infection by infecting other cells and has visible physical characteristics. That is, they can be captured and killed.

What are your questions now? Fortunately, the COVID-19 virus is not entirely new. It is closely related SARS-1 virus,Like COVID-19 departs from China. The disease transmitted about 8,000 people between 2002 and 2003. This is a mild outbreak when compared to the global pandemic caused by COVID-2, also known as SARS-CoV-2. Nevertheless President Donald Trump Suggest Vaccine will do Prepare in NovemberBefore this is licked, there may be a long way ahead of us.

To learn more about the fight against COVID-19 and the potential of vaccines, Salon worked with Dr. William Haseltine, a biologist famous for fighting the HIV / AIDS epidemic, fighting anthrax, and advancing knowledge. I talked. Human genome. He is also the founder and former CEO of Human Genome Sciences, and is currently Chairman and President of Access Health International, a global health think tank. As usual, this interview has been edited for clarity and context.

Why is it difficult to develop a vaccine?

It can be easy or difficult. I don’t know yet … In SARS 1, I tried to make a vaccine for animals, including monkeys, but it didn’t work. So they tried using the surface protein of the virus and thought it worked. And they didn’t work very well to stop the virus, and they didn’t last very long. Therefore, no successful virus vaccine has been developed for any of the coronaviruses. It may be difficult, but I don’t know yet. Hope it gets easier, but nobody knows.

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This is an open issue at this time. If you want to know why, explain it.

It is certainly so.

Many natural infections, and most of the work to be mentioned here, refer to HIV, but many natural infections infect the body in ways that the body reacts to but are harmless to the virus. Thus, in essence, they throw a lot of decoy and protect the most sensitive parts, the parts that have to adhere to surface receptors. Think like a large dented fuzzy basketball, or perhaps like a Pac-Man. Pac-Man holds that dent, which is going to grab the receptor. Everything outside the virus can be blurred, which is what is presented to the immune system, and it is difficult for the immune system to see inside Pac-Man’s mouth. And so many viruses use this kind of trick. So you make a lot of antibodies, but they do not stop the virus from invading your body.

Does it affect our ability to develop vaccines?

Taking the same protein and using a foreign protein to produce antibodies, such as a vaccine, will produce the wrong type of antibody. And the antibodies you raised, you will get a good immune response, but it does not stop the virus. That is fear. Whether this will happen or not is clear, but early experiments performed many years ago with the SARS-1 virus showed that it was not as simple as people wanted. So this may not be easy, but you may be lucky.

For those unfamiliar with epidemiology, explain how to develop vaccines and whether it is easier to kill a disease like COVID-19 than to kill a retrovirus[[[[RNA virus that injects a DNA copy of the genome into host cells] Like AIDS.

The prospect of coronavirus vaccines is not easy. Although it may be possible to make it by traditional methods, so far it has not been proven to be effective against any animal against coronavirus.

There are several ways to make a vaccine. One way is to grow and kill the virus. That is the poliovirus. This is a polio vaccine, but it is relatively simple because poliovirus does not have a type of envelope around it. There is a membrane around the coronavirus. So, when you grow polio and you kill it, it makes a good vaccine, and that’s how to make a vaccine. And you can try it with this virus. It’s unlikely to work, but you can try it.

The second method actually produces purified protein from the virus and mixes it with an adjuvant to make a vaccine.

The third method is to get a gene that specifies the viral protein you want to create and put it into another harmless viral vector. When used as a vaccine, it produces a protein that triggers a protective immune response.

However, to date no one has succeeded in creating a vaccine that protects animals from coronavirus. No vaccine has been tested in humans against members of the Coronaviridae family.

If a coronavirus is considered to be very effective, why is it not a more common type of virus with respect to a pandemic in terms of evolution?

They are pretty common! About a third of all colds are coronaviruses. They are very effective. It is only that they are usually not fatal, they give almost mild symptoms. By the way, the same is true for poliovirus. Poliovirus is a cold virus. It causes paralysis in one in 100 people. However, there are many similar viruses, viruses like polio, and all they do only cause a cold. Coronavirus is such a virus. In most cases, it causes a mild infection. And in the 1950s they were discovered and people were surprised to know that about a third of all colds were caused by the coronavirus. So they are successful.