8 ms·

It's really hard to overstate what an advancement mRNA vaccines will be. MRNA-1273, the Moderna vaccine, was designed in two days. As horrible as this pandemi

It's really hard to overstate what an advancement mRNA vaccines will be. MRNA-1273, the Moderna vaccine, was designed in two days. As horrible as this pandemic has been, we will probably see an equivalent in vaccine technology advances over the next couple years that we saw in weapons advancement from WWII. These things have the potential to treat/prevent cancer, eradicate the flu, deliver gene therapies, so many things that seemed like scifi just 10 years ago.

mxcrossb 6y ago
The tech is great, but aren’t China and Russia deploying more standard replication deficient viruses as vaccines? I think the real development time boost we saw here was that it was easy to get volunteers and easy to test effectiveness due to the huge number of cases.
- aphextron 6y ago
  > The tech is great, but aren’t China and Russia deploying more standard replication deficient viruses as vaccines? The Sinovac and Sputnik vaccines are both less effective and have had serious adverse events in their trials. Sputnik hadn't even entered phase 3 trials and they rolled it out. The mRNA vaccines will be the first to pass the bar of FDA approval by a wide margin.
  - mxcrossb 6y ago
    Thank you for the information!
StavrosK 6y ago
Would new mRNA vaccines need to undergo stringent safety/efficacy testing as well? As I understand it, you make the bit of mRNA you want and stuff it onto the vector, which then deploys it into the cells. Once the technique is mature and well-understood, wouldn't it be much quicker to roll out vaccines for all sorts of things?
- aphextron 6y ago
  >Once the technique is mature and well-understood, wouldn't it be much quicker to roll out vaccines for all sorts of things? Yes, that's the huge leap forward made with this tech versus traditional vaccines. It turns vaccine development into a software problem, instead of hardware problem. For instance, we'll be able to rapidly roll out new flu vaccines for the latest strains and produce them on demand, rather than making a guess at which ones will be circulating a year ahead of time and committing to mass production of those.

mxcrossb 6y ago

The tech is great, but aren’t China and Russia deploying more standard replication deficient viruses as vaccines? I think the real development time boost we saw here was that it was easy to get volunteers and easy to test effectiveness due to the huge number of cases.

aphextron 6y ago
> The tech is great, but aren’t China and Russia deploying more standard replication deficient viruses as vaccines? The Sinovac and Sputnik vaccines are both less effective and have had serious adverse events in their trials. Sputnik hadn't even entered phase 3 trials and they rolled it out. The mRNA vaccines will be the first to pass the bar of FDA approval by a wide margin.
- mxcrossb 6y ago
  Thank you for the information!

StavrosK 6y ago

Would new mRNA vaccines need to undergo stringent safety/efficacy testing as well? As I understand it, you make the bit of mRNA you want and stuff it onto the vector, which then deploys it into the cells. Once the technique is mature and well-understood, wouldn't it be much quicker to roll out vaccines for all sorts of things?

aphextron 6y ago
>Once the technique is mature and well-understood, wouldn't it be much quicker to roll out vaccines for all sorts of things? Yes, that's the huge leap forward made with this tech versus traditional vaccines. It turns vaccine development into a software problem, instead of hardware problem. For instance, we'll be able to rapidly roll out new flu vaccines for the latest strains and produce them on demand, rather than making a guess at which ones will be circulating a year ahead of time and committing to mass production of those.