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Vaccine Tech 30 Years in the Making Is Getting Put to the Ultimate Test
The coronavirus pandemic could change the way we make vaccines
In September 1992, Deborah Fuller traveled from Wisconsin to New York for a scientific conference at the nonprofit Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, brimming with anticipation. She was there to present early but promising research on a completely new vaccine approach that she had been working on.
It turned out to be a fortuitous meeting. “I go there thinking I’m going to be the only one with this new idea, and there were half a dozen other people all presenting this concept,” says Fuller, PhD, now a professor of microbiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle who’s working on a coronavirus vaccine. If other labs were getting the same results, it meant her research wasn’t just a fluke.
The conference organizers were riveted by the new idea. They reshuffled the meeting schedule so that Fuller and the others could present their research during the same session, on the last day of the meeting. Scientists who planned to leave the conference early scrambled to reschedule their flights home so they could stick around to hear about it.
The idea was elegant: Deliver a set of instructions that tells the body’s own cells to make a vaccine.
It was a complete departure from the way vaccines were being made — and largely still are — which involves a complex and costly process. This new approach, by contrast, could be quickly adapted to virtually any infectious pathogen and promised to drastically shorten the timeline it took to bring a vaccine to market. “It was a revolution in the sense of vaccines at the time,” Fuller says. “We immediately recognized its potential for fighting against future pandemics.”
Now, 30 years later, none of these so-called genetic vaccines have ever been approved for human diseases. But a handful of labs and companies have kept at it, steadily improving the technology. And the coronavirus pandemic has presented itself as an opportunity to put the experimental technology to the ultimate test. Now, several genetic vaccines for Covid-19 are advancing through clinical trials and have emerged as front-runners. Moderna, Inovio Pharmaceuticals…
