Name: How would a universal vaccine work?
Uploaded: 2021-08-31
Duration: 7 min 11 s
Description: Experts weigh in on the science behind some of its early studies.

Experts weigh in on the science behind some of its early studies.

How would a universal vaccine work?

Francesco Militello Mirto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Health

the question on the table is can we develop what's referred to as a universal coronavirus vaccine, something that will protect us against the future epidemic or pandemic. The idea of a universal coronavirus vaccine is obviously gaining currency now and more and more people are starting to work on it. The work is all I think still in the laboratory there are not clinical trials yet of these universal vaccine ideas definitely a global effort. I mean there are research groups around the world working on this and health authorities around the world that our interest in this. The step is the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations. Uh, it is a relatively new international organization. It is a public private partnership. It involves lots of national governments, it involves the World Health Organization and it also involves private non governmental actors such as the Melinda Gates Foundation. So with interested in creating these efforts that are happening globally to create a universal vaccine. And thinking that's going on around how you might do that. And and what happened is a grit Stone, which is this California biotechnology company caught the attention of step uh, and you know, looking at these efforts globally, obviously decided the Grit Stones effort was the furthest along maybe the most promising and it's decided to provide almost $21 million I think 20.6 million is the exact number of funding to help Grit Stone run a phase one clinical trials of its universal vaccine in South Africa. And that trial is supposed to start by the end of the year, we formed Grit Stone about six years ago. And the reason we started the company was to try and improve and extend the benefits of cancer immunotherapy using the immune system to kill us. And so as we build grit Stone we had to establish and build two technologies. The first was to identify from all of the different protein mutations that happened in the um yourself which ones could be good targets for the immune system. The second challenge was once I've identified those great targets. The technical term is antigens. How can I administer them to a human to drive a really strong killer T cell response against those antigens. We've been working on this in cancer now And we then as the Star Kobe to pandemic unfolded we realized that we could take these two technologies and potentially apply them to Sars-Cov-2 because most vaccines generate good antibody responses to the virus but not so much on the killer T cell side. And when you have a natural immune response to viral infection you make antibodies and you make killer T cells. It's a reasonable supposition that there's real value in getting the killer T cells side of the equation revved up. I don't see this as a top priority at the moment designing an annual flu vaccine. Tight shot. It's perfectly okay to do some research on this but it's not the immediate priority. I don't think if we had a universal coronavirus vaccine that would prevent any future coronavirus outbreak. Everyone should be immunized with it now on a just in case basis. That's kind of the much more extreme idea because it would basically say let's immunize uh seven billion people on a just in case basis against something that we don't know will happen or when it would happen. So the more plausible and more conservative version of the concept is to have something with reasonably likelihood of certainty of efficacy and have it available to be mass produced and rolled out as and when needed. Then you get into the details of how would you do this? Some of them seem to be based on the idea that if you have a really really strong antibody response against SARS cov two, there would be enough cross reactivity to deal with other corona viruses that are not the same but sufficiently similar. So that's one concept and that's based on making a better version of the coronavirus vaccines that we all now know about from what I've read about the Grit Stone concept, it is largely based on inducing t cell responses against conserved regions of coronavirus is Well, that's a bold concept, should we say. And it's not one that's in sync with most of the other designs or with what we know about protective immunity against coronavirus is our platform. And the reason step is interested in it is that it's a slightly different form of RNA called self amplifying RNA that carries the potential benefit that you can use lower doses to achieve the same or perhaps even better benefit. Uh And that's why dozing is important. Uh you can do that because as the name suggests, the RNA makes copies of itself which means you can use a smaller delivered dose to actually achieve the same effect. And because you actually get double stranded RNA A. That looks really foreign to your immune system and may stimulate an even stronger immune reaction, which is what makes this kind of worth studying separately from the regular M RNA vaccines. You can't really run an efficacy trial against a virus that is crossing over to humans in 20 to 50 years time. Perhaps that you just literally don't know what it is. So you can't run an efficacy trial. So you can only really gauge your success on a relative immunogenicity. What induces the strongest immune responses that are the most cross reactive against viruses? That is a reasonable expectation that a future pandemic virus might mimic. And that's the only way that I could see of doing it. What is your best estimate of a future pandemic virus based on what we know and how well might this vaccine perform against it? And no, that's going to be some degree of judgment calls? I think first of all we should say that is this worth trying. I think the answer isn't undoubted yes because the nihilistic approach and to say too hard. Don't even bother just wait for the next pandemic and we'll try and deal with it when it comes. That comes at a huge crisis in terms of human lives and economic costs and suffering as well. Do I know the answer? Of course not. I think what we're doing is developing a scientifically rational, valid approach. It's based on human data. I think that's important, optimal doses, optimal formulation, optimal content to make sure the immune response is appropriate. That's all on the table. That's what we're working on now and a skeptic might say I don't think you're going to solve that problem. Well you may be right, I hope to prove you wrong.