Scientists develop adaptive vaccine technology to fight epidemics

LONDON (Reuters) – A global pandemic alliance plans to invest up to $ 8.4 million to develop technology to produce industrial vaccines that can be adapted to all diseases many bacteria and viruses such as the flu, the Ebola virus and rabies.

The agreement concluded between the Alliance for Disease Preparedness and a team of scientists from Imperial College London aims to develop a "vaccine platform" using technology allowing the Ribosome DNA, a genome of a virus strain, clone it and multiply it, the technique called "RNA".

The vaccine platform is used with essential components and can be modified to immunize against various diseases by adding a new gene sequence of the target disease to prevent it.

"This could be a huge step forward," said Robin Shattuck, who heads the Imperial team responsible for developing the RapidVAC system. Can change the way we look at how vaccines are made. "

He said many years of research and testing were still needed, but he hoped that this technology would one day lead to the production of single vaccinations to prevent a single pandemic or to produce a mixture of vaccines protected from several different infectious diseases. at the same time.

The idea of ​​this technique is to simulate the functioning of cells in the body to make a vaccine against diseases, which means the introduction of a foreign body that stimulates an immune response instead of the Inject directly to the body with the same serum.

"The other benefit is that the production in this case will be very fast because the whole process is industrial," Shattuck said in a phone interview.

The emergence of an epidemic such as that caused by Ebola in Africa or Zica, which was launched from Brazil, occurs in an irregular and unpredictable way and the situation is changing very rapidly. On the other hand, the development of a vaccine vaccine against these diseases takes at least 10 years. .

The Alliance for Innovations in Pandemic Preparedness is set up in early 2017 to accelerate vaccine development, especially against new diseases that have never been treated.

The alliance and the team hope to start animal experiments in the lab early next year, then move on to the first clinical trials on humans within two years.