FILE_ID.DIZ: YO???? UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai: “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

YO???? UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai: “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

Vaccine breakthrough means no more chasing strainsnews.ucr.edu Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.

As a biologist, I'm cringing at a lot of what's in here. A lot of speculative statements. And the press-release writer seems to be confused about what is going on. Among other things, there are a lot of potential barriers to using live attenuated viruses as vaccines.

I read the paper here:

The paper in question is now available! Let's read it together. "Live-attenuated virus vaccine defective in RNAi suppression induces rapid protection in neonatal and adult mice lacking mature B and T cells"

www.pnas.org

As my spouse said when I read the story to him, "they've cured a lot of diseases over the years in mice." Excited for this finding certainly, but the press release is pretty bad.

It would be helpful to actually be able to read the paper, but it doesn’t seem to be published at the moment, despite what the article says.

Yeah, the original university press release (distinct from the university article) says it'll be published 4/19.

I think scientists underestimate how many mangled reports (both in the press and PR) on scientific studies are entirely due to the scientists involved.

Oh definitely, I can see that happening in the quotes here too.

This (though I'm only biologist adjacent). I was so confused when they started with RNA and then said it was an attenuated virus vaccine. Like, they couldn't have led with RNAi? Anyway, best case is a decade or two, so I'm not holding my breath.

Thanks for this.

Would love to be wrong, but as a virologist I can only see this maybe working as a short term therapy.

My favorite was how the writer said the vaccine is safe in babies!

Mouse babies

mRNA is certainly going to change things. Unfortunately it makes my immune system not know what direction is up.

Ok, but this isn't even mRNA-based. That's a confusion in the article.

What???!! Yeh that’s kind of a big mistake to make.

Do you understand how it's even supposed to work? My knowledge of RNAi isn't great but I'm finding it very confusing.

Inside a single cell, I think so? As a supposedly durable systemic immune response? No clue.

Yeah, we're going to see the real heavies like HIV on the block before too long. mRNA vaccine technology is genuinely miraculous.

Not far off at all www.nih.gov/news-events/...

Clinical trial of HIV vaccine begins in United States and South Africawww.nih.gov Novel vaccine includes NIH-funded technology in development since 2004.

sickos.jpg

Calm down: yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/race-for-t... Your periodic reminder that "One scientist published one paper..." is one small piece of a very big puzzle.

I'm sure that there's a long way to go for actual release, and nobody is expecting it to happen this decade. But knowing this sort of strategy is possible is immense in of itself, I think.

They were sure able to deploy that Covid vaccine quickly...

it took decades to invent mRNA tech, it just coincidentally matured right before covid hit so all they had to do was adjust it to target covid. the linked story is about a *different* type of RNA and a different type of vaccine tech

The person that did a lot of setting up mRNA knowledge and how to use it, did not get tenure.

Professor Katalin Karikó is a consultant for BionTech who developed the vaccine that Pfizer distributes. I hope she makes ALL THE MONEY now despite not getting tenure.

1. Good things happen when you throw a lot of money at a problem. 2. It was kind of an emergency. 3. Also, we got lucky: the virus' genetics were analyzed unusually quickly which shortened the development time substantially.

that was thirty years of work with unpredictable cuts to funding.

It’s because they finally had what was missing before *FUNDING*

Yeah, if you can convince Big Pharma and it's accessories to skip steps. (Good luck) Covid was very much an exception born from crisis. I reckon we'd need a second pandemic to fast track another vaccine.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, I don't think your link is related to OP's link? OP's link is about a new class of vaccine technology, which if it pans out could be adapted to fight a variety of diseases. Your link appears to be about short to medium term COVID vaccines specifically. Can you clarify?

I was in the Moderna COVID vaccine trial and the MD/PhDs running the trial were very quietly like "this stuff is gonna change medicine forever"

they were right. mRNA vaccination is basically "administrator account on ribosomes." anything we know how to code for in protein, we can tell cells to do. that's Star Trek level technology.

The Star Trek level is learning how to hide the mRNA itself from our innate immune response. How to do that was /not/ obvious. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medic...

(point being it definitely took 20+ years to figure this stuff out - it wasn't an overnight miracle, but now that we know how to do it, whew)

didn't one of the people who won the Nobel get let go from UPenn cuz they didn't see the practical applications of her research? lol

Kariko never got a tenure track job from Penn because she had difficulty securing independent grant funding. So it was not just Penn, but a lot of people who didn't think that the work would in the end be viable. Exceptions were Drew Weisman at Penn (who shared the Nobel), BioNTech, and Moderna.

mRNA therapeutics and vaccines had been seen as promising until the field ran into the problem of innate immune responses against the mRNA itself. Kariko was, more than anyone else, the person who recognized that we modify our own mRNA, and that therapeutic mRNA could be made to look like our own.

and when China posted the genome of the COVID virus, it took *2 days* to build the vaccine. The rest of the 18 month cycle of development was just safety testing.

I did a read-through and pulled some interesting quotes from it here: bsky.app/profile/alis... There's no info on what virus was studied. It's one study, on mice. The actual research paper (dead link) does not appear on the website they say it should be on.

As others are saying, this is absolutely preliminary research. This news article is a fluff piece from the local campus news, hyping faculty research looking for further investment so they can continue their research. There's nothing wrong with that, but do not pin your hopes on it.

"...a mouse virus called Nodamura"

huh, I missed it. Thanks.

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what you said!!

yoooo, this is cool!

Let's see if it's real and actually protects against evolution like they think it will before we do victory laps.

Unfortunately this is a terrible and confused press release with a lot of speculation. The actual paper isn't out yet. Plus all the work is in mice - I was in a Phase 1 pan-coronavirus clinical trial that looked GREAT in mice and monkeys and failed utterly in humans.

WOW

I'm hopeful but I feel the article gasses it up more than is realistic

Yeah it’s pure aspirational bs

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