(03-12-2020 07:13 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(03-12-2020 03:49 PM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  We’ve Got The Vaccine, Says Pentagon-Funded Company

Quote:
Canadian firm says it could make 10 million doses per month — if its innovative production method wins FDA approval.
A Canadian company says that it has produced a COVID-19 vaccine just 20 days after receiving the coronavirus’s genetic sequence, using a unique technology that they soon hope to submit for FDA approval.
Medicago CEO Bruce Clark said his company could produce as many as 10 million doses a month. If regulatory hurdles can be cleared, he said in a Thursday interview, the vaccine could start to become available in November.
An Israeli research lab has also claimed to have created a vaccine. But Clark says his company’s technique, which has already been proven effective in producing vaccines for seasonal flu, is more reliable and easier to scale.
“There are a couple of others who are claiming that they have — well, we will call them vaccine[s]” for COVID-19, he said. “But they’re different technologies. Some are RNA- or DNA-based vaccines that have not yet been proven in any indication yet, let alone this one. Hopefully, they’ll be successful.”
How did Clark’s team create one so quickly,? They use plants, not chicken eggs, as a bioreactor for growing vaccine proteins.
Traditional vaccine production requires eggs, a lot of them. Vaccine manufacturers inject the virus into the eggs, where it propagates. But using eggs is expensive, takes a long time, and is far from perfect. Mutations can yield vaccines that don’t match up to the virus they aim to shut down, Clark said
So Medicago doesn’t work with a live virus. Instead, it uses plants, a relatively new approach that has seen much advancement in the past decade. It inserts a genetic sequence into agrobacterium, a soil bacteria, which is taken up by plants — in this case, a close cousin to tobacco. The plant begins to produce the protein that can then be used as a vaccine. If the virus begins to mutate, as is expected for COVID-19, they can just update the production using new plants.
“That’s the difference between us” and egg-based methods, he said, ”we go directly to producing the vaccine or the antibody without having to propagate the virus.”

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So, it turns out---you can produce a vaccine relatively quickly. The problem is, you have to test it because vaccine can actually be counter productive if it doesnt hit right in the sweet spot of immune response created. Too little and it doesnt help. Too much and you get a situation where your own immune system over reaction causes your own death. So, it requires a several pretty rigorous rounds of animal testing---and then several expanding rounds of human testing. That just takes time---so there is only so much you can do to speed things up. You can have hundred farmers planting corn, but it wont make give a bushel of corn 100 times faster. Im starting to think we are at least 18 months away from a viable vaccine available with enough doses to make a real difference.

I think in an emergency we might be able to get a vaccine out by the fall. That's what really worries me. CV-19 is from a family of viruses that don't deal well with hot, humid conditions, particularly when temperatures are above 80F. If this one behaves like its cousins, the worst could be behind us in 2-4 weeks. While not a certainty, I think that is a very likely possibility. But if it goes dormant and returns with colder weather in the fall, again a very likely possibility, we could have a crisis on our hands then.

What I would rather have seen Trump do last night is basically what we did after 9/11. Call a moratorium on everything for a week or two, shut the stock markets down until March 23 (6 trading days) and let's just all catch our breath and get over some of the hysteria.