Vaccine Science Advances Because of COVID-19

December 31, 2020 – The year 2020 will go down as one of the bleakest in modern times when it comes to the human condition and the state of our planet. But in the midst of a raging global pandemic, and the starkest evidence of anthropogenic climate change, scientific collaboration, and the human competitive spirit came to the forefront in the battle to find a way to defeat COVID-19.

Developing vaccines has never been an easy task. From the pioneering efforts of Edward Jenner, a British physician, and scientist in the late 18th century, who created the smallpox vaccine, to Jonas Salk, the American medical researcher who developed a serological polio killer, progress in this field has never been measured in months, but rather in painstaking steps taken over years.

With the global spread of the 2019 version of the coronavirus, however, a paradigm shift in vaccine research and development has become the defacto new standard. What does this mean for scourges like malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, cancer, and other diseases that kill millions annually?

The necessity of finding a quick solution to a global emergency has proven to kickstart a wave of new vaccine development using technologies like genetic sequencing, messenger RNA (mRNA), CRISPR-Cas9, adenovirus delivery systems, and progress in the science of protein folding to accelerate ways of combating diseases that have proven intractable in the past.

Of these technologies, genetic sequencing and mRNA have been at the forefront of the news cycle with the arrival of two vaccines, one developed by Pfizer-BionTech and the other by Moderna. Neither would have come to the forefront without a massive investment in their creation from national governments which pre-ordered hundreds of millions of doses before even the first clinical trials started.

Shortly after COVID-19 emerged in the city of Wuhan and Hubei province in China, researchers were able to sequence the genetic map of the virus. That made it possible to accelerate finding a number of ways to attack it.

COVID-19 proved to be an ideal candidate for an mRNA approach because the virus is relatively stable developing only minor variants over time, which is unlike influenza that rapidly evolves new strains seasonally.

Based on more than a quarter-century of research into genetic solutions for tackling diseases, scientists were able to identify an RNA sequence responsible for a uniquely generated protein associated with the virus, (the spike protein) and then finding a way to deliver it to a host human cell so that it could begin to develop antibodies.

We remain far from defeating COVID-19 at this stage in the fight. But we do have the first of many new technologically-advanced tools to begin the fight to end its global reach. We can hope, that by the end of 2021, we will have beaten it.

What we have learned in these last 12 months is that scientific research combined with adequate funding can lead to significant epidemiological breakthroughs. mRNA vaccines represent one of these. The promise of mRNA technologies in fighting disease will now be realized. Vaccinology is about to undergo a revolution as new mRNA products get synthesized in days, not years. mRNA gives us a plug-and-play solution for tackling viral and bacterial enemies. Swap out the unique protein spike of COVID-19, for one that is unique to malaria, or tuberculosis.