With the whole world’s eyes on Moderna and Pfizer, the creation of a vaccine has never been so closely scrutinized
Vaccinology — the science of vaccine development — is seeing its heyday as pharmaceutical companies across the world scramble to put forward a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine. Looking past the current pandemic, as hard as that may seem, exciting new prospects loom ahead for vaccines.
These are three major developments on the horizon for everything pertaining to vaccines, their preparation and their distribution.
New types of vaccines
As of now, Moderna and Pfizer — two major pharmaceutical corporations — have announced that clinical trials of their vaccines are showing them to be 94.5 and 95 per cent effective, respectively.
Both vaccines are messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, a technology that is not as new and untested as its made out to be.
“The reason that these companies were able to accelerate development of these vaccines so quickly is because they’ve initially developed these vaccines for related applications SARS coronavirus-1 or MERS coronavirus,” said Matthew Miller, an associate professor in the department of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University who researches infectious diseases.
“All of these groups had done really extensive preclinical and early clinical testing of these vaccines that allow them to essentially plug and play SARS COVID-2 into their existing platforms.”
To understand why we may see more of these mRNA vaccines in the future, you have to first understand the more commonly used technology. Most classic influenza vaccines are killed or attenuated viruses, meaning they are a “dead” or “weakened” version of the virus that still activates our immune system. As a result, we build up antibodies that respond quickly in the event that we are infected by the real thing.
COVID-19 might be what puts mRNA vaccine research and practical use over the edge, in terms of widespread adoption.
These mRNA vaccines work a little differently. They instruct our cells to build a certain protein, like the spike protein on SARS CoV2. This process more closely mimics the way a virus would act in our body.
“One of the primary things that mRNA vaccines do, is they basically allow your cells to make the viral proteins in a way that’s analogous to how the virus would make the protein if it was infecting your cells,” said Miller.
While classic vaccine models do a great job of prompting our body to create antibodies, mRNA vaccines also bring out a strong T cell response. T cells are an important part of our immune system, which don’t respond as well to the attenuated or killed virus vaccines.
COVID-19 might be what puts mRNA vaccine research and practical use over the edge, in terms of widespread adoption.
“I think we will see a major expansion of mRNA vaccines, especially for viruses like influenza,” said Miller.
The mRNA vaccines likely wouldn’t replace the age-old vaccines we’ve already been using for the yearly flu. Still, Miller and other experts in the field suggest that mRNA vaccines could be used against groups of illnesses we haven’t been able to touch before — including rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold.
Pandemic-readiness
Although the scientific community has been able to respond to COVID-19 quickly, there are other pathogens where there is far less readiness, ones that are more complicated, more deadly and harder to eradicate.
“It’s really important that we start developing and funding and testing vaccines against these virus families, that we know have the potential of causing widespread disease in humans, before that happens,” said Miller, “Because otherwise, those pandemics could be much more devastating.”
Miller pointed out that if we’d been infected by a different pandemic — even another coronavirus like Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus — the result could have been much worse.
Once COVID-19 is over, expect governments to spend more money in pandemic-readiness to develop vaccines before the need arises.
“MERS coronavirus has a death rate over 30 per cent, which essentially means that one in every three people infected would die,” said Miller. “If a pandemic with a virus like that had happened, it would’ve been catastrophic.”
“What we really need is preparedness to have vaccines at the ready before these kinds of pandemics happen, and, even better, vaccines that might prevent or protect against large virus families that we know have the possibility of causing pandemics.”
Once COVID-19 is over, expect governments to spend more money in pandemic-readiness to develop vaccines before the need arises.
Vaccine infrastructure
One of the clear downsides of an mRNA vaccine is that they break down in warmer temperatures. Both Pfizer and Moderna require their vaccines to be kept at freezing temperature. Pfizer in particular requires its vaccines to be stored at around -70 C.
These storage requirements are already raising concerns across the world about distributing the virus outside of major city centres, where setting up deep freeze storage will be much more difficult.
“One thing that frequently gets forgotten is that after a vaccine is made you still have to get it to the people who need it,” said Miller.
A lack of vaccine infrastructure creates inequitable distribution. Even without considerations of health-care quality, the burden of COVID-19 in a developing country outweighs its burden in a developed country as the systems aren’t in place to control the spread of the virus, said Miller. Once vaccines are widely available, the struggle will commence to provide it to remote communities.
“Many people are forward-thinking and there’s a lot of work by excellent charitable foundations and government organizations focused on equitable vaccine delivery to other places in the world,” said Miller, “Because one lesson that I hope we’ve learned during this pandemic is that infectious diseases are a global problem.”
