Part 3 of 7 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
   Daly said, “If you can grow-up your pathogen (whatever it is), if you mix it in with manganese antioxidants you should be able to obliterate the genome, whether it’s RNA or DNA, and render it completely non-infective and sterile, while at the same time preserving all the structures and peptides, all the ligands and all the things that make up the surface of the virus or bacteria. Then you’ve sort of got like a ghost of what the real thing is.” Today, the reigning speed record for the creation of a new vaccine is Jonas Salk’s development of a polio vaccine. A six-year project was split between about four years of basic research and two years of clinical trials. Daly’s process could reduce the time needed for basic research.
     Complex “trial and error” experimentation is included in many of the traditional and even more modern methods of vaccine development. Contemporary subunit vaccines use recombinant DNA to produce only those parts of a virus that are able to induce a safe response. They are more efficient and cost effective that older vaccine development techniques. However, each subunit vaccine requires their own indefinite period of laboratory research to determine accurately exactly which parts of the pathogen will work in a vaccine. The older methods such as producing a whole virus vaccine with some combination of heat and chemical treatments skip most of the time consuming effort needed by subunit vaccine development needed to identify useful parts of the virus. However, such approaches often damage enough key surface proteins on the virus in the development process that the immune response they evoke can be weak. This weakness is why some vaccine require periodic booster shots.
     There are many theoretically promising vaccine development techniques. As these techniques are investigated a lot of laborious trial and error arises in practice. First, strains of a virus need to be identified and compared. Second, the genomes of the virus needs to be mapped to find the genetic codes for the most useful surface proteins. Third, inactivation methods need to be adjusted or wholly rethought for a given virus. What Daly’s team has done is to figure out a way to bypass most of this activity to make a classic inactivated whole virus vaccine. This can be done very quickly and with little damage to the critical antigenic proteins on the surface of the virus.
    Thanh Nguyen is a mechanical engineer at the University of Connecticut. He works on tiny biodegradable structures for vaccine delivery. He describes Daly’s work as being “really exciting” and “definitely significant.” Sandip Datta is an infectious disease doctors who is currently a clinical director at pharmaceutical giant Merch and was previously the head of the National Institutes of Health’s Bacterial Pathogenesis Unit. He agrees with Daly that this production method could be uniquely suited for expediting vaccine candidates during a pandemic like the current covid-19 crisis.
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