Scientists develop adaptive vaccine technology to fight epidemics

A global epidemic alliance plans to invest up to $ 8.4 million to develop a technology to produce industrial vaccines that can be adapted to all diseases, thereby controlling many bacteria and viruses, such as influenza, Ebola and rabies.

The agreement between the Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness and a team of scientists at Imperial College London aims to develop a "vaccine platform" using a technique that allows ribosome DNA , genome of a strain of virus allowing it to clone and multiply, This technique is called SA-RNA.

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

"It's a huge leap 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 ​​the SA-RNA technique is to simulate the functioning of cells in the body to produce a disease-resistant serum, which involves the introduction of a foreign body stimulating an immune response instead of to inject the same serum directly to the body. "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 Pandemic Preparedness Alliance was created in early 2017 to accelerate the development of the vaccine, 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.