A CURE WAITING FOR A DISEASE:

The SARS outbreak spurred research on deadly, contagious coronaviruses. Another illness in this family, MERS, popped up in the Middle East in 2012. So while the COVID virus is new, research on stopping or preventing a pandemic caused by a coronavirus has at least an 18-year history.

Basic molecular biology research has also become more advanced over the years. Scientists are now so fast at sequencing viral RNA that the coronavirus's sequence was published on January 10, 2020, less than a month after the virus was first discovered.

There has never been an mRNA vaccine licensed for human use; the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, if it reaches full approval as planned, will be the first. But researchers didn't build the technology from scratch this year.

The idea of using RNA (the virus's genetic material, without any other parts of the virus) in a vaccine dates from the early 1990s, so there's been almost 30 years of research on this technology. According to a review published in 2018, mRNA vaccines had already been used to elicit immunity against influenza, Zika, and rabies.

Along the way, scientists ran into problems--like the possibility that mRNA vaccines could cause autoimmune conditions--and also figured out how to solve them. Chemically modifying the mRNA and encasing it in tiny bubbles made it safe. The 2018 review states: "Recent technological advances have now largely overcome these issues, and multiple mRNA vaccine platforms against infectious diseases and several types of cancer have demonstrated encouraging results in both animal models and humans." Even then, this way of developing vaccines was praised for its "capacity for rapid development."

Knowing how to build a given type of vaccine can really accelerate building the actual vaccine. In that sense, we've actually already seen vaccines be developed in less than a year: just look at flu shots. Every year's flu shot is different from the year before, but it's not built from scratch. Vaccine makers already have labs and factories set up to make flu vaccines, and each year they just plug in the specific influenza strains that they'll need.

Remember how the virus's genome was published in January? Moderna told reporters that their labs were already set up to make mRNA vaccines, so that once they downloaded that data, they were able to whip up a vaccine in two days.

Tweet   @brothersjudd