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Looking for a naturally occurring attenuated strain is a waste of time. The problem isn't a lack of vaccine candidates, it's a matter of testing latency. Any a
by bhickey 7y ago
Looking for a naturally occurring attenuated strain is a waste of time. The problem isn't a lack of vaccine candidates, it's a matter of testing latency. Any attenuated strain is just a live virus vaccine and this doesn't skip you to the head of the regulatory line. Finally, synonymous recoding with CpG enrichment is a more robust way to attenuate than relying on natural attenuation.
- rrmm 7y agoWould having just the virus envelope (with surface protiens) without the RNA payload be effective to provoke an immune response?
- bhickey 7y agoI don't know. My lab work was primarily with site directed mutagenesis in DNA viruses (PhiX 174). Production seems like it would be the trickiest part -- How do you produce the capsid in sufficient quantity without the machinery it needs for replication? Maybe you just transfect it into cells. Perhaps you clone some viral genes into the host genome and remove them from the virus? I don't know what this would do with regards to packing the remanent genome into the capsid.
- danieltillett 6y agoAh the “give up before we even try” approach. Did you actually read the post before commenting? Sure you can develop a putative attenuated strain in the lab, but how are you going to collect human data on it quickly? The spread of a natural attenuated strain gives us something that no lab-generated strain can - human data right now.