It's truly impressive how quickly vaccine research is progressing. While there are no guarantees that any of the candidate vaccines being worked on will be safe and effective, the speed with which this has happened would have been impossible not that many years ago.

Impressive, but it still puts arrival at a vaccine at least

By MC Slim JB on Wed, 02/26/2020 - 1:17pm.

three months away, and the ability to produce it at scale 12 to 18 months away. Meanwhile, our leadership spends its time fretting about the stock market and pretending nothing bad is happening.

if im not mistaken

By Old Groucho on Tue, 02/25/2020 - 7:43pm.

a week or so ago, a lab in San Diego also developed a potential vaccine within hours of receiving virus data.

This is Star Trek kinda stuff my brain would've melted over even just a few years ago.

Rest easy though, it'll all work out.
Especially since the CDC is well funded and that the program specifically created and implemented by G.W. Bush to be ready for these global pandemics wasn't shut down to pay for millionaire tax cuts.

Yes!

By anon on Wed, 02/26/2020 - 8:32am.

Way to bring politics into the mix of a vaccine of a virus. Bravo! Man, do you think about millionaires and those with private jets all the time? I've never thought about them, and I'm not a millionaire and yet, I'm quite successful.

Moderna is beyond the Cutting Edge

By Nowy Liberté on Wed, 02/26/2020 - 10:41am.

The creator of the Vaccine for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is not just the creator of a Vaccine -- they are essentially creating the Biotech version of the Integrated Circuit and the companion development tools that made the modern tech-world possible.

No more "hand wiring" of bio components to make a system -- the old Biotech way. Now the vaccine or other therapeutic agents can be designed on a computer and then mass produced by a robotic factory.

Moderna's breakthrough is implementing a means to take advantage of the body's own manufacture of proteins inside the cell based on the instructions carried by the Messenger RNA [mRNA]. The key is that the mRNA is not copied from the body's own DNA but it is provided to the body from outside via an injection.

Moderna has invented and implemented a Development Platform for a very wide variety of therapies based on creating and delivering mRNA to a patient in this manner.

Still -- while the candidate vaccine has been delivered to the NIH for testing in a record time of 42 days form start to finish -- there are several more steps to a successful vaccine:

prove safety
prove that the vaccine will in fact confer immunity to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
prove that the level of immunity is useful and deliverable en masse

All that will take some amount of time and have to deal with the uncertainty of experience with actual human patients infected with the still poorly-known virus. So in the mean-time be prepared for a lot more people getting the disease and more people dying from it.

Here's the Press Release for more information
https://investors.modernatx.com/node/8296/pdf

and here's a tutorial on the mRNA approach followed by Moderna
https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-mrna-technology

However -- beyond this candidate for a vaccine -- the same development tools can be applied to:

repairing Heart Muscle after a Heart Attack
fixing a missing protein in a number of congenital diseases
personalized therapy for cancer

Like it says on the Marriott Hotel Marquee in Kendall Sq. "the Future Lives Here"

Cambridge biotech firm ships samples of possible coronavirus vaccine to feds for study

Comments

I think you a word

Indeed

Site of the old Polaroid

Great- everyone just stay inside for 12-18 months

Very impressive