Thanks for the detail. I think that means that the answers to my questions are “no, not at all, for the more recent versions of RaDVaC, and in fact for earlier versions what we have is evidence that it usually doesn’t produce any immune response”, and “no, not at all, for any version of RaDVaC”.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying that this means you’re bad people, or that it means your thing doesn’t work, or that it means no one should give you money. I’m just trying to assess how likely we should think it is that what you’re doing will turn out to be useful.
I think, in particular, that when Eliezer (in the OP) says
They’ve pretty much proved themselves. They should be nurtured and scaled up to where they can start to replace US and Earth defunct state capacity to do the R&D that leads up to being able to rapidly design new vaccines that rapidly scale in production and deployment.
that first sentence is 100% false unless “proved themselves” means something like “proved that they are smart people” or “proved that they are acting in good faith” rather than “proved that they have something that works”, which means that the second is waaaay premature.
Which, again, doesn’t mean that the RaDVaC project shouldn’t be nurtured. Maybe it should. All science and technology starts out unproven, after all.
Eliezer, if you happen to be reading this: Do you, in the light of the discussion above, still consider that “they’ve pretty much proved themselves”, and are you still confident that the project needs only nurturing and scaling-up before it is ready to start replacing the planet’s existing vaccine R&D efforts? If so, what is it that you think I’m missing?
Actoverco’s data were informative about (positive) safety and immunogenic response in RaDVaC’s Gen 8+9 designs. These data aren’t immediately straightforward (antibody response was greater in immunologically “primed” individuals than in immunologically naive individuals), but really informative along the line of antigen selection, presentation, and dosing.
We (writ large) need vaccines that can be deployed rapidly and are focused on that rapid accessibility. There’s no question that safe & effective vaccines can be made. The question for us is how to make safe & effective vaccines rapidly & simply enough to be widely accessible. Our approach has been to create and share designs openly, that can be (re)produced, adapted, tested, and studied without restriction. We couldn’t do every stage of development in our own lab, so we invited others to use their expertise to contribute. Several have and still are, but I agree that it’s time for us at RaDVaC to invest more (and more directly) in producing data that we can guarantee be shared openly.
that first sentence is 100% false unless “proved themselves” means something like “proved that they are smart people” or “proved that they are acting in good faith” rather than “proved that they have something that works”, which means that the second is waaaay premature.
RaDVaC is not only about the particular technology but also about the way the organization runs differently. The approach of being public about the technology and regularly iterating it is very different than the way vaccines are traditionally produced.
RaDVaC is for example right now both looking into the small peptide version they started out with as well as looking at subunit vaccines.
This is correct. RaDVaC is not committed exclusively to a single technology platform; we evaluated (and continuously re-evaluate) the advantages and disadvantages of vaccine platforms like VLP, subunit, peptide, DNA, and mRNA.
All our designs so far have been based on self-assembling nanoparticles transporting peptide antigens, because all materials for both nanoparticle and peptide antigens are highly accessible: readily available, relatively inexpensive, individually safe (not requiring any advanced biosafety conditions for shipping, storage, or use), and quick to source. This design is also very easily produced.
That basic nanoparticle platform (which we’ve open-sourced, along with our peptide designs) is adaptable to other antigens, such as larger recombinant subunits, which we are working on now, for consideration to add to a future version of our white paper. Advantages to recombinant antigens include likely better immunogenicity than peptides, and greater production independence/decentralizability–plus, cells producing such an antigen would likely be a shareable resource.
Adaptability is, I think, quite a cool feature of a platform, and it’s a feature that’s shared in principle by nucleic acid vaccines. The drawback there is largely one of accessibility: modifying code is no big deal, but executing that code is, in practice, far more difficult than producing peptides or even larger proteins. (For now. Many of us at RaDVaC anticipate that the costs associated with both pseudouridine-mRNA and LNP production will come down drastically over the next few years. We’re excited about that.)
Thanks for the detail. I think that means that the answers to my questions are “no, not at all, for the more recent versions of RaDVaC, and in fact for earlier versions what we have is evidence that it usually doesn’t produce any immune response”, and “no, not at all, for any version of RaDVaC”.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying that this means you’re bad people, or that it means your thing doesn’t work, or that it means no one should give you money. I’m just trying to assess how likely we should think it is that what you’re doing will turn out to be useful.
I think, in particular, that when Eliezer (in the OP) says
that first sentence is 100% false unless “proved themselves” means something like “proved that they are smart people” or “proved that they are acting in good faith” rather than “proved that they have something that works”, which means that the second is waaaay premature.
Which, again, doesn’t mean that the RaDVaC project shouldn’t be nurtured. Maybe it should. All science and technology starts out unproven, after all.
Eliezer, if you happen to be reading this: Do you, in the light of the discussion above, still consider that “they’ve pretty much proved themselves”, and are you still confident that the project needs only nurturing and scaling-up before it is ready to start replacing the planet’s existing vaccine R&D efforts? If so, what is it that you think I’m missing?
Following up to affirm two things:
Actoverco’s data were informative about (positive) safety and immunogenic response in RaDVaC’s Gen 8+9 designs. These data aren’t immediately straightforward (antibody response was greater in immunologically “primed” individuals than in immunologically naive individuals), but really informative along the line of antigen selection, presentation, and dosing.
We (writ large) need vaccines that can be deployed rapidly and are focused on that rapid accessibility. There’s no question that safe & effective vaccines can be made. The question for us is how to make safe & effective vaccines rapidly & simply enough to be widely accessible. Our approach has been to create and share designs openly, that can be (re)produced, adapted, tested, and studied without restriction. We couldn’t do every stage of development in our own lab, so we invited others to use their expertise to contribute. Several have and still are, but I agree that it’s time for us at RaDVaC to invest more (and more directly) in producing data that we can guarantee be shared openly.
RaDVaC is not only about the particular technology but also about the way the organization runs differently. The approach of being public about the technology and regularly iterating it is very different than the way vaccines are traditionally produced.
RaDVaC is for example right now both looking into the small peptide version they started out with as well as looking at subunit vaccines.
This is correct. RaDVaC is not committed exclusively to a single technology platform; we evaluated (and continuously re-evaluate) the advantages and disadvantages of vaccine platforms like VLP, subunit, peptide, DNA, and mRNA.
All our designs so far have been based on self-assembling nanoparticles transporting peptide antigens, because all materials for both nanoparticle and peptide antigens are highly accessible: readily available, relatively inexpensive, individually safe (not requiring any advanced biosafety conditions for shipping, storage, or use), and quick to source. This design is also very easily produced.
That basic nanoparticle platform (which we’ve open-sourced, along with our peptide designs) is adaptable to other antigens, such as larger recombinant subunits, which we are working on now, for consideration to add to a future version of our white paper. Advantages to recombinant antigens include likely better immunogenicity than peptides, and greater production independence/decentralizability–plus, cells producing such an antigen would likely be a shareable resource.
Adaptability is, I think, quite a cool feature of a platform, and it’s a feature that’s shared in principle by nucleic acid vaccines. The drawback there is largely one of accessibility: modifying code is no big deal, but executing that code is, in practice, far more difficult than producing peptides or even larger proteins. (For now. Many of us at RaDVaC anticipate that the costs associated with both pseudouridine-mRNA and LNP production will come down drastically over the next few years. We’re excited about that.)