SoylentNews

hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

A scientist's unconventional project illustrates many challenges in developing new vaccines [sciencenews.org]:

Chris Buck stands barefoot in his kitchen holding a glass bottle of unfiltered Lithuanian farmhouse ale. He swirls the bottle gently to stir up a fingerbreadth blanket of yeast and pours the turbulent beer into a glass mug.

Buck raises the mug and sips. "Cloudy beer. Delightful!"

He has just consumed what may be the world's first vaccine delivered in a beer. It could be the first small sip toward making vaccines more palatable and accessible to people around the world. Or it could fuel concerns about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Or the idea may go nowhere. No matter the outcome, the story of Buck's unconventional approach illustrates the legal, ethical, moral, scientific and social challenges involved in developing potentially life-saving vaccines.

Buck isn't just a home brewer dabbling in drug-making. He is a virologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., where he studies polyomaviruses, which have been linked to various cancers and to serious health problems for people with weakened immune systems. He discovered four of the 13 polyomaviruses known to infect humans.

The vaccine beer experiment grew out of research Buck and colleagues have been doing to develop a traditional vaccine against polyomavirus. But Buck's experimental sips of vaccine beer are unsanctioned by his employer. A research ethics committee at the National Institutes of Health told Buck he couldn't experiment on himself by drinking the beer.

Buck says the committee has the right to determine what he can and can't do at work but can't govern what he does in his private life. So today he is Chef Gusteau, the founder and sole employee of Gusteau Research Corporation [gusteaucorp.org], a nonprofit organization Buck established so he could make and drink his vaccine beer as a private citizen. His company's name was inspired by the chef in the film Ratatouille, Auguste Gusteau, whose motto is "Anyone can cook."

Buck's body made antibodies against several types of the virus [zenodo.org] after drinking the beer and he suffered no ill effects, he and his brother Andrew Buck reported December 17 at the data sharing platform Zenodo.org, along with colleagues from NIH and Vilnius University in Lithuania. Andrew and other family members have also consumed the beer with no ill effects, he says. The Buck brothers posted a method for making vaccine beer [zenodo.org] December 17 at Zenodo.org. Chris Buck announced both publications in his blog Viruses Must Die [substack.com] on the online publishing platform Substack, but neither has been peer-reviewed by other scientists.

[...] Buck's unconventional approach has also sparked concerns among other experts about the safety and efficacy of the largely untested vaccine beer. While he has promising data in mice that the vaccine works, he has so far reported antibody results in humans from his own sips of the brew. Normally, vaccines are tested in much larger groups of people [sciencenews.org] to see how well they work and whether they trigger any unanticipated side effects. This is especially important for polyomavirus vaccines, because one of the desired uses is to protect people who are about to get organ transplants. The immune-suppressing drugs these patients must take can leave them vulnerable to harm from polyomaviruses.

Michael Imperiale, a virologist and emeritus professor at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, first saw Buck present his idea at a scientific conference in Italy in June. The beer approach disturbed him. "We can't draw conclusions based on testing this on two people," he says, referring to Buck and his brother. It's also not clear which possible side effects Buck was monitoring for. Vaccines for vulnerable transplant patients should go through rigorous safety and efficacy testing, he says. "I raised a concern with him that I didn't think it was a good idea to be sidestepping that process."

Other critics warn that Buck's unconventional approach could fuel antivaccine sentiments. Arthur Caplan, who until recently headed medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, is skeptical that a vaccine beer will ever make it beyond Buck's kitchen.

"This is maybe the worst imaginable time to roll out something that you put on a Substack about how to get vaccinated," he says. Many people won't be interested because of antivaccine rhetoric [sciencenews.org]. Beer companies may fear that having a vaccine beer on the market could sully the integrity of their brands. And Buck faces potential backlash from "a national administration that is entirely hostile to vaccines [sciencenews.org]," Caplan says. "This is not the place for do-it-yourself."

But the project does have supporters who say it could instead calm vaccine fears by allowing everyday people to control the process. Other researchers are on the fence, believing that an oral vaccine against polyomavirus is a good idea but questioning whether Buck is going about introducing such a vaccine correctly.

[...] Buck says his self-experiment illustrates that a person can be safely immunized against BK polyomaviruses through drinking beer. But even though Buck produced antibodies, there is no guarantee others will. And right now, people who drink the vaccine beer won't know whether they produce antibodies or if any antibodies they do produce will be sufficient to protect them from developing cancer or other serious health problems later.

Other scientists familiar with Buck and his yeast project also have conflicting opinions about how it might influence public trust and acceptance of vaccines.

If something were to go wrong when a person tried to replicate Buck's beer experiment, Imperiale worries about "the harm that it could do to our ability to administer vaccines that have been tested, tried and true, and just the more general faith that the public has in us scientists. Right now, the scientific community has to think about everything it does and answer the question, 'Is what we're doing going to cause more distrust amongst the public?'"

That's especially true now that health officials in the Trump administration are slashing funding [sciencenews.org] for vaccine research, undermining confidence [sciencenews.org] in vaccines and limiting access to them [sciencenews.org]. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans are still confident that childhood vaccines are highly effective at preventing illness [pewresearch.org]. But there has been an erosion of trust in the safety of those vaccines, particularly among Republicans.

[...] Buck feels a moral imperative to move forward with his self-experiments and to make polyomavirus vaccine beer available to everyone who wants it. "This is the most important work of my whole career," he says. "It's important enough to risk my career over." What he's doing in his home lab is consistent with his day job, he adds. "At the NIH in my contract it says my job is to generate and disseminate scientific knowledge," he says. "This is my only job, to make knowledge and put it out there and try to sell it to the public."

He doesn't see himself as a maverick. "I'm not a radical who's trying to subvert the system. I'm obeying the system, and I'm using the only thing that is left available to me."

Original Submission