Part 4 of 7 Parts (Please read Parts 1, 2 and 3 first)
     Jean Peccoud is a molecular biologist at Colorado State University. He recently wrote about competing approaches to a coronavirus vaccine for The Conversation. He is concerned that Daly’s manganese complex method may hit complications during mass production. Laboratories across the world have proven able to grow the coronavirus in a cell culture. This is a highly scalable approach when compared to the time-consuming method by which flu shots have been incubated in hen’s eggs for the past seventy years. There are still obvious potential risks growing up to industrial quantities of a lethal pathogen. Peccoud said, “If you look at who is winning the race to develop a vaccine, none of the leading teams are approaching it by growing the virus on a large scale.”
    There are currently about one hundred and fifteen different coronavirus vaccine candidates which are being fast-tracked. The furthest along of these efforts have involved a method borrowed from gene replacement therapy where a harmless adenovirus is created with the genetic materials that is required to produce some but not all of the coronavirus’ telltale surface proteins.  The Jenner Institute at Oxford University and its partners in industry, as well as the Chinese biotech company CanSino and China’s Academy of Military Sciences, have reported success testing their adenoviral vector vaccines. However, the New York Times noted in its recent coverage, “Neither technology has ever produced a licensed drug or been manufactured at scale.”
    Peccoud suggests that “this technology with the manganese complexes might be more relevant if coronavirus stays around for years and we need to have a really good vaccine because it’s becoming an endemic disease, like malaria in tropical regions or chicken pox among school children across the world. Maybe the vector vaccines, because they are going after a single antigen, their efficacy is not going to be as high as a whole virus vaccine.”
     For Tobin’s group at BMI, the manner in which Daly’s approach innovates upon this very old and well-established method for vaccine development (the inactivated virus vaccine) is in fact its strong suit. Tobin says it is a much more certain investment in time and resources.
    Michael Cox is a past D. radiodurans researcher. He talked about the reaction of microbiologists and radiobiologists when Daly and his team first proposed that “very high intracellular manganese” was the secret to the radiation defense of the bacteria in 2004 in the journal Science. Cox said “There was some strong pushback, and I think there still is. I think it’s going to turn out that Daly was probably right, and I think it’s going to turn out that there were other factors involved, as well.”
   John Battista is a chemist whose has a lab at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. He has used DNA microarrays to identify the cellular components in the D. radiodurans genome that are responsible for expressing its novel repair proteins. He suspects that “in the end, it will be some mixture of the two” explanations. D. radiodurans will be found to contain some uniquely competent DNA and RNA repair proteins and, also, some uniquely effective antioxidants protecting them. Battista has mostly retired from the study of and debate over D. radiodurans but he continues to peer review studies on the microbe at the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, where he is an editor.
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