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Derek Lowe over at Science has a roundup of the status of current (article published 29 June 2020) Coronavirus vaccine trials/research.
This roundup of current vaccine research/trials includes information about many vaccine trials, broken down by vaccine types. These types include (quotes are all from TFA:
- Viral Vectors
This class uses some other infectious virus, but with its original genetic material removed. In its place goes genetic instructions to make coronavirus proteins, and when your infected cells do that, it will set off an immune response.
Number of trials (per TFA): 9
- Genetic Vaccines
These take DNA or RNA coding for coronavirus proteins and inject that directly into the bloodstream. "Directly" isn't quite the right word, though – for these things to work, they have to be formulated and modified to survive destruction in the blood, to be taken up through cell membranes, and to be used for protein production once they're inside.
Number of trials (per TFA): 8
- Recombinant protein vaccines
Here we get to a technique that really is used for human vaccines. The previous two categories force your own cells to make viral antigen proteins, but here you're making them industrially and just injecting them directly. The advantage can be that such protein production can be accomplished in many different ways and is already done on a large scale. That said, every new protein is a new project, with its own idiosyncrasies.
Number of trials (per TFA): 6
- Attenuated Virus Vaccines
This is another well-precedented vaccination technique. It involves producing a weakened form of the actual infectious virus, one that is not capable of causing damage but can still set off the immune system. There are several ways to do this, and it's a bit of an art form involving taking the virus through a huge number of replications in living cells as you select for variants that are less and less harmful.
Number of trials (per TFA): (None listed)
- Inactivated Virus Vaccines
This is also one that's also been used in medical practice for many years, and it's another inactivation step beyond the attenuated viruses. Heat or chemical agents are used to damage the virus to the point that it can no longer infect cells at all, but the plan is for there to be enough of the viral material left unaltered to still raise an immune response.
Number of trials (per TFA): 4
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @03:19AM (3 children)
Funny. I'm good friends with an epidemiologist. She knows I'm into stats, math, and computer modelling. She's worked with HIV/AIDS (longitudinal) and Ebola. She's "at peace" the way that visitors to hospices can be at peace. She's at peace the way she was when she was a resident and had to CPR a cold corpse because the person who brought it wouldn't admit that he hadn't checked on his mother for a week. There are a handful nations with sufficient contact tracing - S.Korea! - but she's convinced me about the coming tsunami of death which is coming as obviously as the ground to a parachutist. It's a big world, and it won't be a Black Plague, but it's already bad and if you think this is the worst of it, you should review contemporary models and try to see how you can wrangle such a result out of them, because barring China-style lockdowns or S.Korea-like hyperaccurate contact tracing, I can't.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 04 2020, @04:18AM (2 children)
You might be right. I forgot to add- the PhD researcher I know also said that even though the infection rates might rise, the death rates are dropping.
One of the things I remember hearing at the start of the pandemic is that it's nearly impossible to stop it from spreading; they just wanted to slow it enough that medical treatment and research wouldn't be overwhelmed.
During WW1, WW2, space race, and maybe other events we poured huge resources into the effort. Any thoughts as to why we're not ramping up medical research? I know there's increased activity, but not on the scale I'd like to see, and preferably well coordinated and collaborative.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday July 04 2020, @02:31PM (1 child)
IIUC, the second strain of the virus is more infectious than the first, though no more deadly. It *MAY* be less deadly, as people with higher virus levels of the second strain don't do any worse than those with lesser levels of the first strain. OTOH, they tend to *have* higher levels, so probably a wash.
That said, there are various indications which can be read as there being a higher level of immunity to COVID than has been assumed. (They can also be read in other ways. Whoops!)
When I speculate, my guess is that the models are all wrong, and that things aren't *quite* as bad as they're predicting. I'm assuming that antibodies don't persist, but that immunity is more dependent upon TCells which do persist. (That the TCells persist isn't known. I assume that to account for some of the data on susceptibility. There are other explanations.) Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to check on TCells.
That said, even if the models are correct, this isn't a civilization ending plague. It's nothing like "the plague years" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year [wikipedia.org] , and civilization survived that just fine. The major long term problem will be the massive disability it leaves behind in the survivors, which we're only starting to understand, and which the press has been ignoring.
Caution: I'm a programmer, not an expert in the field. These statements are the result of casual reading I do think they're correct, but I don't put a huge amount of certainty in them.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 04 2020, @07:57PM
Agreed. And your "caution" statement should apply to all of us implicitly. There are few true experts here. I would take Azuma Hazuki's advice on many things, esp. pharma. And several other people's of course. But most of us are just tossing around ideas and our limited knowledge (which is why I'm so against the mod system but I won't get into that here- even I'm weary of it.)
So there's another layer to think about. We know that as with most diseases, there's a Gaussian distribution of cases in that some people get exposed and never develop symptoms, and some die rather quickly. So that leads me to: well, a lot of the weakest people have died, so maybe the rest are stronger, therefore biasing the measurement of susceptibility.