• Question: do you make vaccines

    Asked by bank520gama to Sophie S, rosiewatts, oliviafleming, Mimi, michellethom, Leon, Fiona B on 18 Dec 2024.
    • Photo: Mimi Asogwa

      Mimi Asogwa answered on 18 Dec 2024:

      No I don’t make vaccines but know a bit from my school days.

      Vaccines are derived from dead, weakened or inactivated form of a microorganism which is administered to healthy humans to illicit an immune response from the individual. The immune system keeps a memory of this. When the individual is subsequently exposed to the actual disease causing microorganism, the immune system remembers it has encountered this foreign body previously, and releases a lot more antibody to fight the disease. Vaccines have been used for a hundreds of years dating back to 1700 to protect against various diseases including measles, mumps, rubella, flu, tetanus, shingles, polio etc.

      Vaccines are administered to all age groups ranging from children, adolescent and older people.
      Vaccine production can take years but had definitely saved millions of lives over the years.

    • Photo: Michelle Thom

      Michelle Thom answered on 3 Jan 2025:

      Yes, some of the work that I do involves making vaccines.

      Sometimes we start with the virus and make small changes to its DNA sequence that stop the virus from causing illness, but allow the host immune response to still recognise the virus and be able to protect itself quickly if it were to encounter the ‘real’ virus at a later date. There are lots of different ways we can engineer these modified live virus (MLV) vaccines to make them better/safer options compared with live virus vaccines. We also prepare virus like particles (VLPs) as vaccines, which behave and act like real viruses but are unable to replicate or cause infectious diseases. These also work by priming the host immune response to be ready for the real virus and can be handled safely. For some bacterial diseases, we may concentrate on important proteins from the bacteria, like cell surface membrane proteins to make a recombinant protein cocktail vaccine.

      The key features of all these vaccines is that they are all administered in a special stabilising solution called an adjuvant, and they all need to trigger a strong host immune response (i.e., produce neutralising antibodies) that are long-lived and fast-acting. Some viruses, like SARS-Cov-2, have lots of variants….so the ultimate goal is to be able to make one vaccine per disease that induces cross-specific antibodies to all the different variants of that virus. But this is very tricky!

      There are many other factors involved in vaccine development, including cost of production (vaccines need to be affordable to all), stability of vaccine (transport and storage of vaccines to low and middle income countries may be limited therefore if the vaccine is only stable for 1 month at -20oC, this might not work in rural African communities with limited electricity and long travel times between villages), vaccine dosage and duration of immunity (many vaccines work best with prime and then boost vaccine, how long does the protection last? would the vaccine need to be given every year? and how is the vaccine given (injection (most vaccines), intranasal (some flu vaccines) or oral (polio)?, and is the vaccine safe for all?

      There are lots of things to consider when making vaccines! Please let me know if you have any more questions about vaccine development.

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