3 ms·

It could be. It depends on the source and cost per dose of the adjuvant. Adjuvants from natural products can be supply limited and also costly to produce. Rega

It could be. It depends on the source and cost per dose of the adjuvant. Adjuvants from natural products can be supply limited and also costly to produce. Regardless, it makes you wonder why they went forward with that particular adjuvant for the TB trial in the first case. I'm not dismissing shingles, just triaging it relative to the seriousness of TB.

gumby 3y ago
> Regardless, it makes you wonder why they went forward with that particular adjuvant for the TB trial in the first case. Well sometimes you select an excipient or adjuvant because some other one you might have chosen has some interaction with your API (active pharmaceutical ingredient -- the thing you're actually trying to deliver). More often though they are pretty arbitrary: the program lead or someone on the team had used that compund before and knew how to handle it or already had all the literature needed for a regulatory submission (had an older submission) or perhaps the division you're submitting to is already quite familiar with that one so you use it. And of course once you're approved for and done an initial trial (phase 1) with one formulation you don't want to go back and redo all the safety studies, especially for something that isn't the API itself, if you don't have to. Note, I have not worked in vaccines, only in anti-infectives, so their can always be cultural and technical differences that I'm not aware of! Consider this the equivalent of "experienced Lisp, C++ and assembly programmer reads article written by a layperson about a problem with a Java program, and is dubious about the layperson's diagnosis".
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  :) I'm a synthetic biologist, but don't work with eukaryotes outside of knowing some basics about expression cassettes, so sure. I don't know to what extent the ProPublica writer was informed by their sources, but they're typically pretty good journalists. Still, I get your point.

gumby 3y ago

> Regardless, it makes you wonder why they went forward with that particular adjuvant for the TB trial in the first case. Well sometimes you select an excipient or adjuvant because some other one you might have chosen has some interaction with your API (active pharmaceutical ingredient -- the thing you're actually trying to deliver). More often though they are pretty arbitrary: the program lead or someone on the team had used that compund before and knew how to handle it or already had all the literature needed for a regulatory submission (had an older submission) or perhaps the division you're submitting to is already quite familiar with that one so you use it. And of course once you're approved for and done an initial trial (phase 1) with one formulation you don't want to go back and redo all the safety studies, especially for something that isn't the API itself, if you don't have to. Note, I have not worked in vaccines, only in anti-infectives, so their can always be cultural and technical differences that I'm not aware of! Consider this the equivalent of "experienced Lisp, C++ and assembly programmer reads article written by a layperson about a problem with a Java program, and is dubious about the layperson's diagnosis".

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
:) I'm a synthetic biologist, but don't work with eukaryotes outside of knowing some basics about expression cassettes, so sure. I don't know to what extent the ProPublica writer was informed by their sources, but they're typically pretty good journalists. Still, I get your point.