The NY Times notes that the person, I assume, in charge of managing the current pandemic and espousing a multiplicity of dicta, has just noted the need for more vaccine development. They note:
But what will happen if the next pandemic comes from a virus that causes Lassa fever, or from the Sudan strain of Ebola, or from a Nipah virus? Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is promoting an ambitious and expensive plan to prepare for such nightmare scenarios. It would cost “a few billion dollars” a year, take five years for the first crop of results and engage a huge cadre of scientists, he said. The idea is to make “prototype” vaccines to protect against viruses from about 20 families that might spark a new pandemic. Using research tools that proved successful for Covid-19, researchers would uncover the molecular structure of each virus, learn where antibodies must strike it, and how to prod the body into making exactly those antibodies. ... The prototype vaccines project is the brainchild of Dr. Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He presented the idea in February of 2017 at a private meeting of institute directors.
However we proposed an even more aggressive program which uses Bayesian or predictive approaches. We noted:
Viral variants have been developing in COVID-19 and especially in the spike protein. In order to address these changes one must also modify the vaccines currently being produced. There are several ways to do this. One is the classic post hoc manner of monitoring what is produced and then address it. The second extreme is pre hoc, anticipating what most likely will occur and vaccinate against this anticipated variant. We present a proposal for a Bayesian pre hoc approach to vaccine development with COVID-19 variants.
In fact recent work on protein structure makes many of these ideas current. In Science they note:
Last week, two groups unveiled the culmination of years of work by computer scientists, biologists, and physicists: advanced modeling programs that can predict the precise 3D atomic structures of proteins and some molecular complexes. And now, the biggest payoff of that work has arrived. One of those teams reports today it has used its newly minted artificial intelligence (AI) programs to solve the structures of 350,000 proteins from humans and 20 model organisms, such as Escherichia coli bacteria, yeast, and fruit flies, all mainstays of biological research. In the coming months, the group says it plans to expand its list of modeled proteins to cover all cataloged proteins, some 100 million molecules.
Namely we take the above posed approach and using the recent efforts on protein synthesis, and then using the putative most likely changes in current variants predict the most likely next step. From that we can generate a plethora of new vaccines in an ongoing rolling forward preemptive basis.
Posts
