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I don’t know much about the subject - when one of these institutions discovers a vaccine, do the rest just give up and settle the loss of having come second in

I don’t know much about the subject - when one of these institutions discovers a vaccine, do the rest just give up and settle the loss of having come second in the race? Do the private companies then automatically switch to producing as much of the successful vaccine as possible to meet demand and turn a profit?

egwor 6y ago
I imagine they keep going since side effects could be better, or it could be more effective.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  A handful of the first SARS vaccines “worked” (in that they led to antibody production), but also had nasty side effects.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    It's like how there's a cure for HIV that you really don't want.
    - djsumdog 6y ago
      You mean death? Or am I missing something?
      - gridlockd 6y ago
        HIV is curable but the treatment is generally worse than just management with antivirals.
      - mattkrause 6y ago
        I would assume they mean the CCR5 stem cell/bone marrow thing. A handful of patients (2?) have undetectable viral loads after being treated for leukemia. In these cases, the bone marrow or stem cells were from donors with a mutation in CCR5 that confers some resistance to HIV. The mechanism isn't completely understood, AFAIK, since people with the CCR5 delta32 mutation have partial, but not complete, resistance to HIV normally. It's not a very viable treatment yet: the transplant procedure is brutal (a friend went through it) and you need to be unlucky enough to need a transplant, yet lucky enough to find a donor that has the right mutations (which again, are not completely known) AND is otherwise compatible with the patient. Still, very exciting for a possible mechanism, but also probably not coming to a hospital near you this decade. Here's one of the studies: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa0802905 https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa0802905
glofish 6y ago
not really, usually there is less competition for developing vaccines as the timelines are more relaxed and it would be a waste of money to have several groups discover the vaccines to the same disease Multiple different vaccines could (and probably will) be discovered. These may have different mechanisms and tradeoffs and those too will be taken into account when scaling up to population. Now who owns what, who gets it first, and who gets paid and in what way, those are thorny issues that have not yet been worked out.
rrmm 6y ago
No, in fact I think Bill Gates has fronted the money to develop several candidate vaccines fully to shorten the time to widespread introduction as much as possible. Likely all of them would be developed anyway as some might end up failing (either during testing or during mfr) and I imagine demand is going to be high.
dustinmoris 6y ago
no, there’s still IP which plays a role and different vaccines have different pros and cons and logistically it might also be easier to scale multi different vaccines to the demands of the world population than a single one.
fuckknows 6y ago
Even if we have one, the larger problem will be scale. Having more than one type of effective vaccine available may actually be useful, since our existing manufacturing capacity for the different manufacturing processes can be used.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  That is also why all the major players with vaccine development already in humans (including but not limited to this one) have already started making manufacturing deals with large pharmaceutical corpoprations. Vaccination on large scale will likely require tens of millions of doses, if not more (and let's not forget you may need more than one inoculation).
  - wikibob 6y ago
    Where do you derive the “tens of millions” of for the number of doses required? That wouldn’t even be enough to vaccinate a mid sized EU country.
    - lbeltrame 6y ago
      I originally wrote "billions", thought I was exaggerating, so I edited the post. Probably off on the other side of the interval.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    The vaccine manufacturing point needs way more attention. We were talking about ventilator manufacturing weeks after there was no chance they'd be done in time. The economic benefits to distributing a vaccine quickly would be huge, but I haven't heard world leaders talking about how to do it--they're still on the last war. Luckily, Bill Gates is spending on it, but this needs way more attention because this is our chance to be ahead of the virus for once. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/bill-gates-7-potential-coronavirus-vaccines/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/bill-gates-7-potentia...
rsynnott 6y ago
It's likely that by the time they know this works (or doesn't work) and is safe (or isn't safe), many others will be in an advanced state of development. Totally plausible that there'll be a few available at some point. This is a government funded university project, so "losing the race" is likely not a primary concern; I'm sure if someone else came out with a magic vaccine fully tested and ready to mass manufacture tomorrow the researchers on this project would be pretty happy about that.
jcranmer 6y ago
Derek Lowe gives a good overview of how different kinds of vaccines work here: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/15/coronavirus-vaccine-prospects https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/15/co... The short answer is that there is a bunch of different types of vaccines, and each type has different constraints on their production. Someone who makes an mRNA vaccine isn't going to be able to easily switch to making a live attenuated vaccine instead, for example. Also, first does not necessarily mean best: again, with so many approaches, a vaccine using a different approach can have wildly different side-effects and risk factors. So being second (or even, say, tenth) isn't necessarily a loss. That said, there are so many projects pushing forward that many of them are bound to fail early. Given the history of cooperation already in this crisis, some of those companies who find their coronavirus vaccine efforts going up in smoke may well choose to help scale out other, more successful efforts--or instead help by taking on more of the current vaccine production efforts, as polio and the flu aren't going away just because coronavirus is here.
tedunangst 6y ago
The Sabin polio vaccine continued to be developed after the Salk vaccine was already deployed for various reasons.
empath75 6y ago
I imagine that what is discovered trying to develop a vaccine for this will be readily applied to other viruses.
JProthero 6y ago
The Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government, Patrick Vallance (who is a clinical pharmacologist, and formerly president of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, a pharmaceutical multinational), said this in a Government press conference on 17 April: 'The vaccine could come from anywhere. We've got a domestic vaccine discovery programme in the UK which is being supported, absolutely, as fast as we can go, but the vaccine can come from anywhere. GSK and Sanofi have announced they're doing a vaccine together, which is fantastic news. Most of the big companies are doing vaccines. This is going to come from somewhere, we just need to back lots of horses at the moment, and to make sure we're in a great position to access a vaccine when it occurs. And that's why organisations like CEPI are so important as well; to make sure that the world sees this as a way to get a vaccine, and we all need to be part of the same approach to trying to get as many vaccines as we can. And we may need more than one vaccine.' Link to the press conference: https://youtu.be/jWOCpmjdHiw?t=1430 https://youtu.be/jWOCpmjdHiw?t=1430 Some other comments have referred to the Gates Foundation's contribution to developing vaccines; the foundation's involvement in establishing CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), which Vallance referred to, is a significant part of this.

egwor 6y ago

I imagine they keep going since side effects could be better, or it could be more effective.

mattkrause 6y ago
A handful of the first SARS vaccines “worked” (in that they led to antibody production), but also had nasty side effects.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  It's like how there's a cure for HIV that you really don't want.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    You mean death? Or am I missing something?
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      HIV is curable but the treatment is generally worse than just management with antivirals.
    - mattkrause 6y ago
      I would assume they mean the CCR5 stem cell/bone marrow thing. A handful of patients (2?) have undetectable viral loads after being treated for leukemia. In these cases, the bone marrow or stem cells were from donors with a mutation in CCR5 that confers some resistance to HIV. The mechanism isn't completely understood, AFAIK, since people with the CCR5 delta32 mutation have partial, but not complete, resistance to HIV normally. It's not a very viable treatment yet: the transplant procedure is brutal (a friend went through it) and you need to be unlucky enough to need a transplant, yet lucky enough to find a donor that has the right mutations (which again, are not completely known) AND is otherwise compatible with the patient. Still, very exciting for a possible mechanism, but also probably not coming to a hospital near you this decade. Here's one of the studies: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa0802905 https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa0802905

glofish 6y ago

not really, usually there is less competition for developing vaccines as the timelines are more relaxed and it would be a waste of money to have several groups discover the vaccines to the same disease Multiple different vaccines could (and probably will) be discovered. These may have different mechanisms and tradeoffs and those too will be taken into account when scaling up to population. Now who owns what, who gets it first, and who gets paid and in what way, those are thorny issues that have not yet been worked out.

rrmm 6y ago

No, in fact I think Bill Gates has fronted the money to develop several candidate vaccines fully to shorten the time to widespread introduction as much as possible. Likely all of them would be developed anyway as some might end up failing (either during testing or during mfr) and I imagine demand is going to be high.

dustinmoris 6y ago

no, there’s still IP which plays a role and different vaccines have different pros and cons and logistically it might also be easier to scale multi different vaccines to the demands of the world population than a single one.

fuckknows 6y ago

Even if we have one, the larger problem will be scale. Having more than one type of effective vaccine available may actually be useful, since our existing manufacturing capacity for the different manufacturing processes can be used.

lbeltrame 6y ago
That is also why all the major players with vaccine development already in humans (including but not limited to this one) have already started making manufacturing deals with large pharmaceutical corpoprations. Vaccination on large scale will likely require tens of millions of doses, if not more (and let's not forget you may need more than one inoculation).
- wikibob 6y ago
  Where do you derive the “tens of millions” of for the number of doses required? That wouldn’t even be enough to vaccinate a mid sized EU country.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    I originally wrote "billions", thought I was exaggerating, so I edited the post. Probably off on the other side of the interval.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  The vaccine manufacturing point needs way more attention. We were talking about ventilator manufacturing weeks after there was no chance they'd be done in time. The economic benefits to distributing a vaccine quickly would be huge, but I haven't heard world leaders talking about how to do it--they're still on the last war. Luckily, Bill Gates is spending on it, but this needs way more attention because this is our chance to be ahead of the virus for once. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/bill-gates-7-potential-coronavirus-vaccines/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/bill-gates-7-potentia...

rsynnott 6y ago

It's likely that by the time they know this works (or doesn't work) and is safe (or isn't safe), many others will be in an advanced state of development. Totally plausible that there'll be a few available at some point. This is a government funded university project, so "losing the race" is likely not a primary concern; I'm sure if someone else came out with a magic vaccine fully tested and ready to mass manufacture tomorrow the researchers on this project would be pretty happy about that.

jcranmer 6y ago

Derek Lowe gives a good overview of how different kinds of vaccines work here: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/15/coronavirus-vaccine-prospects https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/15/co... The short answer is that there is a bunch of different types of vaccines, and each type has different constraints on their production. Someone who makes an mRNA vaccine isn't going to be able to easily switch to making a live attenuated vaccine instead, for example. Also, first does not necessarily mean best: again, with so many approaches, a vaccine using a different approach can have wildly different side-effects and risk factors. So being second (or even, say, tenth) isn't necessarily a loss. That said, there are so many projects pushing forward that many of them are bound to fail early. Given the history of cooperation already in this crisis, some of those companies who find their coronavirus vaccine efforts going up in smoke may well choose to help scale out other, more successful efforts--or instead help by taking on more of the current vaccine production efforts, as polio and the flu aren't going away just because coronavirus is here.

tedunangst 6y ago

The Sabin polio vaccine continued to be developed after the Salk vaccine was already deployed for various reasons.

empath75 6y ago

I imagine that what is discovered trying to develop a vaccine for this will be readily applied to other viruses.

JProthero 6y ago

The Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government, Patrick Vallance (who is a clinical pharmacologist, and formerly president of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, a pharmaceutical multinational), said this in a Government press conference on 17 April: 'The vaccine could come from anywhere. We've got a domestic vaccine discovery programme in the UK which is being supported, absolutely, as fast as we can go, but the vaccine can come from anywhere. GSK and Sanofi have announced they're doing a vaccine together, which is fantastic news. Most of the big companies are doing vaccines. This is going to come from somewhere, we just need to back lots of horses at the moment, and to make sure we're in a great position to access a vaccine when it occurs. And that's why organisations like CEPI are so important as well; to make sure that the world sees this as a way to get a vaccine, and we all need to be part of the same approach to trying to get as many vaccines as we can. And we may need more than one vaccine.' Link to the press conference: https://youtu.be/jWOCpmjdHiw?t=1430 https://youtu.be/jWOCpmjdHiw?t=1430 Some other comments have referred to the Gates Foundation's contribution to developing vaccines; the foundation's involvement in establishing CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), which Vallance referred to, is a significant part of this.