Hello!
Hemant here. Across the world, governments are racing to vaccinate their entire populations against COVID-19.
That we have so many vaccines developed under a year is a remarkable feat. Typically, vaccine development take multiple years and even decades in some cases.
So what was different this time? How did we end up going from no vaccines to so many vaccines in under a year?
In today’s essay, I will write about 3 vaccines - the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the Moderna vaccine, and the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine.
But before that —
How are vaccines typically developed?
The way vaccines work is simple - you inject a weakened or dead strain of a virus into your body, and your body cells create antibodies that defend you against the actual virus.
However, mass-scale vaccine production is a long process.
Before creating a vaccine, you first need to isolate dead or weakened strains. Then, you need to find a way to replicate them. Then, you need to actually test if these vaccines work. Typically, trials are done in animals first (eg: mice) before human subjects.
Based on the results seen in trials, vaccines need to be improved to ensure that there are zero to minimal side effects on humans. Also, they should be applicable to many segments of the population. Most importantly, they should be able to immobilize the virus they are meant to.
So, what was different about COVID?
The biggest motivation to find a working vaccine was: we were in the middle of a pandemic and the world economy had come to a standstill.
Someone needed to act!
Which meant - government and private bodies across the world showed a willingness to throw away money on research, and corporations stepped up to increase production before even a single vaccine was approved.
At the same time, because COVID was widespread, scientists were able to recruit enough candidates for their trials, which resulted in faster trials and conclusions.
But none of the above would have mattered if we did not have the technology to create a vaccine so fast.
It is the result of multiple decades of scientific innovation that scientists are now able to create vaccines in a matter of months as compared to years.
What is this scientific innovation?
Vaccines across the word were developed using different techniques. But the story of the ones developed by Pfizer and Moderna is fascinating.
mRNA technology
If you remember high-school biology, you might have heard the terms DNA and RNA. DNA stands for DeoxyRibonucleic Acid, and RNA for Ribonucleic acid.
Feel free to ignore the complicated words above.
Here’s how they work —
RNA is responsible for making proteins in our cells, which are what help cells perform any kind of an activity. Whenever our DNA (which contains the blueprint of a cell), wants to create a certain type of a protein, it activates a portion of the DNA which contains the "recipe" for creating these proteins.
This creates multiple copies of that piece of DNA, and is called messenger RNA (mRNA, in short). These copies of mRNA are then used to create proteins.
What would happen if we were able to artificially create mRNA that could instruct our body to produce certain types of proteins?
This is exactly how mRNA vaccines work.
Doctors inject certain mRNA into our body that instructs our cells to create proteins similar to the proteins found in the actual coronavirus. Since our body is smart, it produces antibodies against these. So when the actual coronavirus says Hi, we can Bye-bye it at once. 👋👋
History of mRNA
The above idea sounds simple, but in reality, it took 3 decades to prove that it had real applications that worked!
The original scientist working on this - Katalin Karikó, spent the 1990s collecting rejections for her grant proposals to work on this technology.
While in theory, the concept was fine, in practice, our body acted against this artificially induced mRNA. Basically, our body sensed an intruder, and acted to defend itself against it.
In fact, in 1995, she got demoted since her work was not seeing any acceptances. But she persisted with it. With the aid of another professor, she was able to create a hybrid mRNA that could sneak its way into the body's cells without triggering our defense mechanisms.
These findings were published in a scientific journal in 2005. While the research papers didn't catch the eyes of many initially, a few key scientists at Stanford University noticed. These scientists started to use the mRNA technology to create stem cells that could be used to cure many kinds of illnesses - from Parkinson's to spinal cord injuries.
These scientists then collaborated to create a new biotechnology firm, based on their mRNA research. The firm's name is one that you might have heard of - Moderna, which was a combination of "modified RNA".
But other scientists across the world were also starting to notice. Another company, called BioNTech, was born to explore the potential of this mRNA technology.
But formation of companies was the easier part. Getting products approved by regulatory authorities was hard. Just as an example, as of November 2020, BioNTech had 13 compounds in clinical trials for many illnesses, but none of them was approved for production and general use.
That was, until COVID-19 was discovered.
After the virus was discovered in China in December 2019, scientists isolated the genetic code of the vius and posted it online in January 2020. And because the mRNA technology doesn't need the actual deactivated/dead virus to create a vaccine, scientists at both Moderna and BioNTech got started!
Within 42 days of isolating the genetic code, scientists at Moderna managed to create a compound that could deactivate the virus and prevent it from spreading.
While Moderna cruized on its own, BioNTech partnered with Pfizer for mass-scale production of their vaccine.
Both the companies launched their vaccines in broadly a similar timeframe.
The mRNA technology is a gamechanger for the world - it has the potential to not only create vaccines faster, but even cure genetic diseases that don't have a cure yet.
What about other vaccines?
While mRNA was a gamechanger, in another part of the world, scientists at the Oxford University were also able to create a vaccine in record time.
The Ebola Outbreak of 2014-2016 had scientists wondering what to do when the next deadly virus struck. Experts across the world had predicted that we weren’t prepared for a pandemic caused by an unknown coronavirus.
Thus, they had been working on creating technologies that could help produce vaccines much faster.
At the Oxford University, scientists were able to create a "plug-and-play" system, where they took one virus, and engineered it to become a building block of a vaccine against another.
In the case of COVID, scientists used a common cold virus that infected Chimpanzees and tweaked it using the strands isolated from the COVID-19 virus when it was detected. The virus affecting the chimpanzees was also genetically modified to prevent any adverse effects on humans.
Now, when they found the genetic code of the Coronavirus, this "plug-and-play" method of creating vaccines helped.
This resulted in the creation of the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine, commonly known as Covishield in India.
In conclusion
The story of mRNA is a testament to the fact that good things could take decades to take shape. The “plug-and-play” system developed at Oxford also provides us with a way to create vaccines rapidly and at scale.
We can’t thank the scientists working on these innovations enough!
Sources
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Thanks for reading :)
Hemant