Now I realize there’s another: the mRNA vaccines are not that new, they simply never made it public before. Just something that dawned on me.
Early papers on mRNA therapeutics date back to the late 1980s/early 1990s, with a number of small scale tests and trials starting by the late 1990s. Making custom arbitrary mRNA has been affordable/feasible since at least the mid-2000s. BioNTech was founded in 2008, and Moderna was founded in 2011, which means the relevant tech at that point was already far enough along to warrant founding companies that were going to need a lot of funding to bring anything to market. But instead of making vaccines targeting infectious diseases, they both mostly targeted cancer immunotherapy. I assume that’s because those are the treatments they were able to get funding for, even though it’s a much harder problem technically.
I don’t know when the first year was they they could have designed a successful vaccine against a novel virus in a day and a half, but the odds of that happening just before covid hit are obviously very low, especially since more recent trials and studies are showing that we can also quickly develop (better) vaccines against the flu and malaria, and the success with covid was not an unlikely outcome.
I don’t know when the first year was they they could have designed a successful vaccine against a novel virus in a day and a half, but the odds of that happening just before covid hit are obviously very low, especially since more recent trials and studies are showing that we can also quickly develop (better) vaccines against the flu and malaria, and the success with covid was not an unlikely outcome.
I did not get this part (maybe there’s a missed word or something. Are you implying that they had all tech in place to successfully manufacture such vaccines quickly?
So, to sum up:
mRNA has been studied and used (?) for about 30 years now
Moderna and BioNTech have been around for a while, and their past research has built up their scientific base.
Out of 18 mRNA vaccines developed around the world only 3 made it to clinical trials, and two made it to production
Manufacture? No. Use? Only at lab scale, in animals or a few patients for small studies. Design? Yes, and the design process did not require any additional new tech nor the resources of a large pharmaceutical company.
Yes, old school vaccines have a lot more history behind them and large organizations were more familiar with them and so they were better equipped to get them through trials and scaled up for deployment. But the mRNA vaccines that did make it through seem to be more effective than those old school vaccines.
Of those 18, how many actually failed trials vs. other reasons for not having come to market (didn’t get funding, didn’t have the pre-existing expertise needed, didn’t move fast enough relative to competitors)? Also, four of those 18 were BioNTech, and counting that as a success and three failures seems like a mistake when it’s the same company trying multiple things initially and then proceeding with the best one.
How many old-school vaccine development efforts didn’t pan out, or only got approved because of extensive government support in their countries of origin?
My take is that we have had, for at least a handful of years, the ability to design a new mRNA vaccine against a novel virus in a matter of days, test it in a matter of months, and scale it up in less than a year. Instead, the companies founded to develop that kind of technology had to go in a different direction (targeting cancer), and without the pandemic they would have languished much longer without bringing any mRNA therapeutics to market at all. The pandemic cut through enough bureaucracy that they got a product out and built manufacturing capacity, and now that they have done that, they’re quickly able to repeat that success for other diseases.
I do not expect the pandemic to lead to a flurry of other new traditional vaccines, because those haven’t suddenly gotten easier or cheaper to develop, we just threw more resources at them for covid.
As far as I can tell, if we had had better regulatory and research policy, we could have lived in the world where Moderna or BioNTech had been working on infectious disease mRNA vaccines all along, and launched an improved flu vaccine back in 2016 or so, so that by early 2020 they already had some manufacturing capacity and supply chains in place that they could expand and replicate (with at least the medical community knowing this was a thing that had been used millions of times). I do not believe that that world ever had to have made any technological advances that ours didn’t make, yet they would have been able to mass produce our most effective covid vaccines much, much faster than we did. They would know that they knew how to fight a virus.
Edit to add: I worry that many people (1) think this is what a worst-case-scenario pandemic looks like, and (2) think that next time there’s a new disease, the solution will be to mask up and shut down indefinitely, instead of immediately designing an mRNA vaccine, conducting large trials as fast as possible, and pre-emptively manufacturing hundreds of millions of dose so they’re ready to go ASAP, with an expectation that all relevant regulatory agencies will work round the clock to remove all unnecessary roadblocks to approval.
Early papers on mRNA therapeutics date back to the late 1980s/early 1990s, with a number of small scale tests and trials starting by the late 1990s. Making custom arbitrary mRNA has been affordable/feasible since at least the mid-2000s. BioNTech was founded in 2008, and Moderna was founded in 2011, which means the relevant tech at that point was already far enough along to warrant founding companies that were going to need a lot of funding to bring anything to market. But instead of making vaccines targeting infectious diseases, they both mostly targeted cancer immunotherapy. I assume that’s because those are the treatments they were able to get funding for, even though it’s a much harder problem technically.
I don’t know when the first year was they they could have designed a successful vaccine against a novel virus in a day and a half, but the odds of that happening just before covid hit are obviously very low, especially since more recent trials and studies are showing that we can also quickly develop (better) vaccines against the flu and malaria, and the success with covid was not an unlikely outcome.
I did not get this part (maybe there’s a missed word or something. Are you implying that they had all tech in place to successfully manufacture such vaccines quickly?
So, to sum up:
mRNA has been studied and used (?) for about 30 years now
Moderna and BioNTech have been around for a while, and their past research has built up their scientific base.
Out of 18 mRNA vaccines developed around the world only 3 made it to clinical trials, and two made it to production
9 “old-school” vaccines made it through the trials
This does sound somewhat realistic: old tech is better-known and had more successful attempts at.
Manufacture? No. Use? Only at lab scale, in animals or a few patients for small studies. Design? Yes, and the design process did not require any additional new tech nor the resources of a large pharmaceutical company.
Yes, old school vaccines have a lot more history behind them and large organizations were more familiar with them and so they were better equipped to get them through trials and scaled up for deployment. But the mRNA vaccines that did make it through seem to be more effective than those old school vaccines.
Of those 18, how many actually failed trials vs. other reasons for not having come to market (didn’t get funding, didn’t have the pre-existing expertise needed, didn’t move fast enough relative to competitors)? Also, four of those 18 were BioNTech, and counting that as a success and three failures seems like a mistake when it’s the same company trying multiple things initially and then proceeding with the best one.
How many old-school vaccine development efforts didn’t pan out, or only got approved because of extensive government support in their countries of origin?
My take is that we have had, for at least a handful of years, the ability to design a new mRNA vaccine against a novel virus in a matter of days, test it in a matter of months, and scale it up in less than a year. Instead, the companies founded to develop that kind of technology had to go in a different direction (targeting cancer), and without the pandemic they would have languished much longer without bringing any mRNA therapeutics to market at all. The pandemic cut through enough bureaucracy that they got a product out and built manufacturing capacity, and now that they have done that, they’re quickly able to repeat that success for other diseases.
I do not expect the pandemic to lead to a flurry of other new traditional vaccines, because those haven’t suddenly gotten easier or cheaper to develop, we just threw more resources at them for covid.
As far as I can tell, if we had had better regulatory and research policy, we could have lived in the world where Moderna or BioNTech had been working on infectious disease mRNA vaccines all along, and launched an improved flu vaccine back in 2016 or so, so that by early 2020 they already had some manufacturing capacity and supply chains in place that they could expand and replicate (with at least the medical community knowing this was a thing that had been used millions of times). I do not believe that that world ever had to have made any technological advances that ours didn’t make, yet they would have been able to mass produce our most effective covid vaccines much, much faster than we did. They would know that they knew how to fight a virus.
Edit to add: I worry that many people (1) think this is what a worst-case-scenario pandemic looks like, and (2) think that next time there’s a new disease, the solution will be to mask up and shut down indefinitely, instead of immediately designing an mRNA vaccine, conducting large trials as fast as possible, and pre-emptively manufacturing hundreds of millions of dose so they’re ready to go ASAP, with an expectation that all relevant regulatory agencies will work round the clock to remove all unnecessary roadblocks to approval.