Could mRNA make us superhuman?

‘Until recently most people had never even heard of mRNA vaccines. Now scientists believe they may be the key to solving a wealth of health problems...

‘The theory behind the mRNA vaccine was pioneered by University of Pennsylvania scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who both recently received the 2021 Lasker Award, America's top biomedical research prize. Even in 2019, however, mainstream mRNA vaccines were believed to be at least five years away. The pandemic fast-forwarded this field of medicine by half a decade. Kathryn Whitehead, an associate professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and a key collaborator of Weissman and Karikó admits, "there weren't many people in the mRNA therapeutics world who would have imagined 95% initial efficacy rates in this emergency scenario".

‘But now, the possibilities are seemingly endless. Or, as Blakney puts it: "Now it's like, OK, so it's worked for a viral glycoprotein, what other vaccines can we make with it? And what can we do beyond that?"... 

‘All this raises the question: could mRNA therapeutics give us almost superhuman immunity? Already Covid-19 mRNA vaccines lead some people to produce very high levels of antibodies, able to neutralise several variants of Covid-19 at once. 

‘There's also the potential to mix various mRNA vaccines together into a single health booster vaccine, which could ward off cancers and viruses at the same time. While it's just speculation at present, Fu says, "you could take a whole bunch of different flavours… a cocktail of mRNAs that make different proteins selective for your particular need." Both Moderna and Novavax already have combined Covid-19 and flu vaccines in development.’

Read here (BBC, Nov 23, 2021)

How the rise of antivirals may change the course of the pandemic

‘Making them isn't easy. But new pills to treat COVID-19 are now showing promise at curbing illness and saving lives...

‘Unlike vaccines that can prevent infection, antivirals act as a second line of defense, slowing down and eventually arresting progression of a disease when infections occur. They’re also important when effective vaccines aren’t available against viral diseases, as is the case for HIV, hepatitis C, and herpes.

‘But developing antivirals is an expensive and difficult endeavor. That’s especially true for acute respiratory diseases, for which the window for treatment is short. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that has unleashed the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have resorted to repurposing old drugs or compounds that were being tested against other diseases.’

Read here (National Geographic, Nov 5, 2021)

The raging evolutionary war between humans and Covid-19

‘Fighting the pandemic isn’t only about vaccines and drugs. It’s about understanding how viruses mutate and change inside us, and among us...

‘The major change to the immunity of all the hosts SARS-CoV-2 is likely to try to infect will be, of course, vaccination. That’s human ingenuity fighting viral expertise, but it can also exert a kind of direct adaptive pressure on the virus. History has examples of so-called leaky vaccines—those that aren’t effective enough to prevent all infections or all transmission, and allow better-adapted variants of whatever bug they’re trying to squish to live to fight another day.

‘In fact, one group of researchers has a model that suggests that could even happen with the new batch of vaccines against Covid—especially those that require two doses and seem to confer different levels of immunity depending on how far apart they’re administered, or whether someone skips the second one. Here's how: If one extreme is a population totally naive to a new virus, completely vulnerable and with no immunity, and the other extreme is a population with perfect sterilizing immunity, what happens to a population in between? If a vaccine allows infection but no transmission, the virus doesn’t have a chance to evolve.

‘But if a vaccine or vaccination strategy allows some infection and some transmission? “The ones that are the best at getting around the host’s defenses are the ones that are most likely to persist,” says Caroline Wagner, a bioengineer at McGill and one of the people working on the model. If that’s all true, a leaky vaccine or leaky vaccination strategy could actually drive antigenic drift and create even worse variants. Wagner and her colleagues acknowledge that they don’t have enough data to put bounds on their model yet, but they worry about strategies like one proposed in the UK to abandon second doses as a way of speeding the process and husbanding scarce vaccine, or the way some countries are hoarding vaccine while others go without (potentially letting the virus, and variants, circulate and evolve freely).’

Read here (Wired, Mar 1, 2021)

Why it’s so hard to make antiviral drugs for Covid and other diseases

‘Antibiotics abound, but virus-fighting drugs are harder to come by. Fortunately, scientists are getting better at making and finding them...

‘The pandemic has sent scientists scrambling to find treatments. Heise [virologist Mark Heise of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill], for one, is testing a wide range of drugs—not just standard antivirals—against SARS-CoV-2 in lab dishes, as part of the Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Discovery Initiative (READDI). The idea is that, because the virus depends on many processes in human cells, a variety of medications that act on human proteins might give doctors an edge by hurting the virus more than the patient. That throws the doors open to considering medications that were originally designed for cancer, psychosis, inflammatory conditions and autoimmune disease, to see if they might have a shot against Covid-19.

‘But the READDI collaborators—including academic centers, pharmaceutical companies and nongovernmental organizations—are aiming for more than a Covid-19 treatment. READDI hopes to identify and test potential medications for as-yet-unknown infections that may crop up in the future.

‘By getting early human safety testing done ahead of time, they’ll be ready to spring into action when those future outbreaks happen. As Heise says, “We don’t want to repeat what we’ve just been through.”

Read here (Scientific American, Feb 11, 2021)

Dawn beckons as Covid vaccines roll out, but the next few months promise to be the darkest yet, and echoes of the AIDS era

‘One strange aspect of plagues is that they often finish strong. I learned this the hard way last time around. Many people have a general sense of AIDS being terrible in the 1980s and then slowly petering out in the 1990s, as treatments improved. It’s intuitive to think this way, and even to remember things this way. But, in reality, the worst ever year for deaths from AIDS in the US was 1995 — over a decade after the first deaths in America — and just before the arrival of the cocktail therapy that turned everything around. The virus killed more people in America in the year right before the medical breakthrough than in any other previous year.

‘...this [Covid] plague, like many others, could become worse yet before it suddenly turns the corner. The next couple of months may be the most fatal of the entire pandemic — even as freedom from this virus is within sight. There’s a special agony to those deaths, as there will be for all those human beings who will die of a virus for which a vaccine already exists.’

Read here (Genetic Literacy Project, Feb 8, 2021)

Fighting the Covid infodemic

‘Countering the COVID-19 infodemic requires not only facts, but also the coordinated and strategic advocacy for which those fighting HIV are renowned. In the face of misinformation, silence kills. All segments of society must act now to dispel myths and amplify the voice of science. Our lives, and especially those of the poorest and most marginalized, depend on it.’

One of the co-authors is Adeeba Kamarulzaman, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the University of Malaya. She is also President of the International AIDS Society.

Read here (Project Syndicate, Sept 18, 2020) 

How to stop Covid-19 fuelling a resurgence of AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis

‘A focus on the coronavirus has disrupted detection and treatment of other infectious diseases. Governments and funders can do four things to avert a catastrophe.

‘First, hospitals and health authorities in affected cities and regions must recognize that AIDS, malaria and TB are surging again... Second, researchers must continue to refine their models using more real-world data... Third, there is a need for public-information campaigns... Fourth, these campaigns cannot on their own keep surgeries and wards open, or equipment functioning. The resurgence of infectious diseases has created a greater demand for tests, treatments and research. All of these need more funding.’

Read here (Nature, August 12, 2020)

Lessons for Covid-19 from the early days of AIDS

‘Thirty-six years ago, we were, like today, in the midst of a new and still somewhat mysterious global pandemic. In the U.S. alone, more than one million people were infected with HIV, and 12,000 had already died of AIDS. At the time, we were just beginning to understand how the virus worked. But that didn’t stop some leaders from making wildly optimistic claims about an AIDS vaccine being delivered within two years.

‘Now, with COVID-19, we are in a remarkably similar spot: 2.7 million people have been infected across the U.S., and 128,000 have died of the disease. Despite our limited understanding of how the novel coronavirus works and what it does to the human body, many are putting what I consider a disproportionate amount of faith in the possibility of a COVID-19 vaccine by 2021. My feelings today echo my feelings a third of a century ago: yes, a vaccine may be possible, but it is by no means a certainty.’

Read here (Scientific American, July 6, 2020)

Famed HIV researcher on the race to find a Covid-19 treatment

‘David Ho is in a race against time to find a treatment for COVID-19. Fortunately it's the kind of race he's run before. Ho, the famed virologist and director and CEO of the Aaron Diamond AIDS research center at Columbia University, rose to prominence decades ago with his HIV research. Now he's working to develop a drug that can interrupt the coronavirus' ability to replicate, which, if successful, could lead to a treatment for COVID-19. His team is also studying antibody responses to the virus and is among dozens of labs racing to develop treatments.

‘The Jack Ma Foundation recently gave Ho and other researchers at Columbia University a $2.1 million grant to support their efforts to identify antiviral drugs and antibodies that can be used to fight the coronavirus.

‘Ho: My group is not so much working on a vaccine. We're trying to discover small-molecule drugs or develop antibodies that can be used either as prophylactics or therapeutics. We think the timeline for antibodies in particular can be much faster. We know we have the technology to fish out and construct very powerful antibodies that can be used to treat the infection, as well as prevent the infection.’

Read here (NBC News, May 1, 2020)