Identifying the right short snippets takes time, while using the whole protein is simpler and more likely to work.
If you identify snippets that are conserved over evolutionary time, it’s harder for the virus to mutate in a way that it becomes immune to your vaccine.
Specifically, the ultimate purpose of a vaccine is to get protein into the body.
That sense got me to write my last post. I think there’s some hope that bringing the vaccines into cells in the body produces a slightly better immune response then having them in blood and giving an adjuvant.
If it’s so cheap and easy to make vaccines, why aren’t commercial ones made this way?
That might be the “why does nobody prescribe melatonin”-question that Scott Alexander discussed. You can’t patent “we target the spike protein” as that’s the obvious thing that everybody is doing.
In particular, the Novavax vaccine sounds similar, so why wasn’t that the first vaccine to market?
It seems Novavax spent more time testing different variations before deciding that using the spike protein as everybody else is the way to go.
As far as I understand they also ran their own clinical trials while Moderna and BioNTech got external help running the trials which might made running the trials faster.
The cost of peptides is probably super-linear in length.
This seems to be true for the amount that needs to be produced to do biology at home. If you however optimize hela cells to produce a given protein and then just let them doublicate this gives you proteins that are cheap enough if you do things at scale.
If you however optimize hela cells to produce a given protein and then just let them doublicate this gives you proteins that are cheap enough if you do things at scale.
Do people actually do this? I would expect it to be both more expensive and riskier to use HELA cells rather than bacteria, but I’ve never looked into the details. Do they just not separate the target protein from all the other proteins, and therefore want it mixed with human proteins rather than bacterial proteins?
If you identify snippets that are conserved over evolutionary time, it’s harder for the virus to mutate in a way that it becomes immune to your vaccine.
That sense got me to write my last post. I think there’s some hope that bringing the vaccines into cells in the body produces a slightly better immune response then having them in blood and giving an adjuvant.
That might be the “why does nobody prescribe melatonin”-question that Scott Alexander discussed. You can’t patent “we target the spike protein” as that’s the obvious thing that everybody is doing.
It seems Novavax spent more time testing different variations before deciding that using the spike protein as everybody else is the way to go.
As far as I understand they also ran their own clinical trials while Moderna and BioNTech got external help running the trials which might made running the trials faster.
This seems to be true for the amount that needs to be produced to do biology at home. If you however optimize hela cells to produce a given protein and then just let them doublicate this gives you proteins that are cheap enough if you do things at scale.
Do people actually do this? I would expect it to be both more expensive and riskier to use HELA cells rather than bacteria, but I’ve never looked into the details. Do they just not separate the target protein from all the other proteins, and therefore want it mixed with human proteins rather than bacterial proteins?
I read to a bunch of different stuff and it might be that it’s easier to you some other bacteria here.