A coronavirus vaccine probably won't be ready before the end

On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 9:51:10 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Thursday, April 23, 2020 at 9:00:05 AM UTC+10, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 5:34:01 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
A coronavirus vaccine will "most likely" not be ready before the end
of 2021, according to the head of the world's second-largest
pharmaceutical company.

"I'm afraid that the most likely scenario is that we will not have a
vaccine before the end of next year," Severin Schwan, the CEO of
Roche, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday.
[...]

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-vaccine-probably-wont-ready-before-end-2021-roche-2020-4


We never have vaccines for common colds or AIDS because those mutate
every few weeks. We should know by now how often this one mutates, so
do we?

They haven't even developed a universal influenza vaccine. If this similarly mutates into a bunch of strains each year, then it will be with us forever.

There are schemes to develop an anti-influenza vaccine which would be active against a range of influenza viruses.

As with the proposed anti-SARS vaccine

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8218?etoc
they do depend on creating a protein fragment that looks like the working end of the cell-wall penetrating protein - the influenza version of the corona virus "spike" protein. Nobody seems to have had any success yet, but the approach does seem to be under active investigation.

The magic bullet is an antibody that targets a viral envelope protein known to be invariant with mutation. It can't just be any protein, it has to be a protein essential to viral replication. The first order of business is even finding an invariant protein. As far as I know they're not discovered through computation, they have to use other means from samples collected in nature.

This stuff about going after spikes and other obvious stuff is not the same..

You read too much of that sycophantic PNAS stuff, like that dumb article about the quantum dot being used to study about 1% of the influenza replication sequence and making it out to be a really big deal.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 9:41:26 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Thursday, April 23, 2020 at 10:14:00 AM UTC+10, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 7:46:38 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 5:34:01 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
A coronavirus vaccine will "most likely" not be ready before the end
of 2021, according to the head of the world's second-largest
pharmaceutical company.

"I'm afraid that the most likely scenario is that we will not have a
vaccine before the end of next year," Severin Schwan, the CEO of
Roche, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday.
[...]

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-vaccine-probably-wont-ready-before-end-2021-roche-2020-4


We never have vaccines for common colds or AIDS because those mutate
every few weeks. We should know by now how often this one mutates,
so do we?

They haven't even developed a universal influenza vaccine. If this
similarly mutates into a bunch of strains each year, then it will be
with us forever.

What happened to the Spanish flu? No vaccine. Isn't that with us
forever?

Probably mutated in its animal reservoir to become noninfectious to humans. There may a chance the coronavirus will do the same, since it's predominantly an animal virus with just a very small percentage of the strains infectious to humans. They need to get it out of the human race first though. China will do its best to prevent that from happening.

I wonder why Fred thinks that. The Chinese enthusiasm for eating exotic wild animals will probably pick up a few new zoonoses from time to time, but the African enthusiasm for "bush meat" creates exactly the same problem.

You can eat infected meat until it comes out of your ears and you won't be infected. It's the people slaughtering and dressing the meat with direct contact with blood that are getting infected.
Viral infections from bushmeat, like HIV, are slow acting and take decades to kill their host. The really bad stuff comes from eating rodents or being exposed to fecal material from rodents, like Ebola. And it's not just Africa. South America is full of similarly nasty germs.
The worst stuff almost always originates in rodents. Bats are the same family.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 9:50:16 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Thursday, April 23, 2020 at 10:32:03 AM UTC+10, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 8:12:28 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-04-22 19:46, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 5:34:01 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
A coronavirus vaccine will "most likely" not be ready before the end
of 2021, according to the head of the world's second-largest
pharmaceutical company.

"I'm afraid that the most likely scenario is that we will not have a
vaccine before the end of next year," Severin Schwan, the CEO of
Roche, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday.
[...]

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-vaccine-probably-wont-ready-before-end-2021-roche-2020-4


We never have vaccines for common colds or AIDS because those mutate
every few weeks. We should know by now how often this one mutates,
so do we?

They haven't even developed a universal influenza vaccine. If this
similarly mutates into a bunch of strains each year, then it will be
with us forever.

What happened to the Spanish flu? No vaccine. Isn't that with us
forever?

It went away completely except in pigs. All modern swine 'flus are
apparently descended from the 1918 virus. (That may have been when 'flu
first crossed into pigs.)

It was first sequenced from stored tissue samples by Jeffrey
Taubenberger, and subsequently reconstituted as live virus in 2005.

Something gave it to pigs. I just don't see domesticated pigs as a natural animal reservoir. Whatever happened to it, an animal reservoir was at play.

If Fred knew a little more about the subject he'd be aware that influenza comes from ducks, in the same way that Covid-19 comes from bats.

The influenza reservoir is migratory birds. And just knowing that is not enough. There is a global surveillance system in place to inform, among many other functions, the next season's influenze vaccine mix.

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.0030167

He'd also be aware that the Chinese habit of rearing ducks and pigs on the same small farms has meant that there are influenza viruses that infect pigs, and some of them infect humans as well - hence swine flu.

Phil Hobbs suggestion that it went from us to pigs does is probably wrong. Pigs probably had it first.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/1918flupandemic.htm

It doesn't seem to have leaked out.

For which we have to be grateful.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, April 24, 2020 at 1:06:05 AM UTC+10, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:

On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 9:51:10 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, April 23, 2020 at 9:00:05 AM UTC+10, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 5:34:01 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
A coronavirus vaccine will "most likely" not be ready before the end
of 2021, according to the head of the world's second-largest
pharmaceutical company.

"I'm afraid that the most likely scenario is that we will not have a
vaccine before the end of next year," Severin Schwan, the CEO of
Roche, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday.
[...]

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-vaccine-probably-wont-ready-before-end-2021-roche-2020-4


We never have vaccines for common colds or AIDS because those mutate
every few weeks. We should know by now how often this one mutates, so
do we?

They haven't even developed a universal influenza vaccine. If this similarly mutates into a bunch of strains each year, then it will be with us forever.

There are schemes to develop an anti-influenza vaccine which would be active against a range of influenza viruses.

As with the proposed anti-SARS vaccine

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8218?etoc
they do depend on creating a protein fragment that looks like the working end of the cell-wall penetrating protein - the influenza version of the corona virus "spike" protein. Nobody seems to have had any success yet, but the approach does seem to be under active investigation.

The magic bullet is an antibody that targets a viral envelope protein known to be invariant with mutation.

The proteins aren't invariant with mutation. Selection just ensure that if they mutate in the wrong way, the mutant virus can't infect anything and dies out.

As the PNAS news item points out the SARS spike protein is subtly different from
the Covid-19 spike protein, and the bit of the spike protein that should be expressed to generate an antibody should be tweaked to reflect that difference.

Note that this isn't the whole spike protein. That was tried and didn't work, presumably because the bit of the spike protein that anchors it in the shell of the virus isn't accessible to the antibody.

> It can't just be any protein, it has to be a protein essential to viral replication. The first order of business is even finding an invariant protein. As far as I know they're not discovered through computation, they have to use other means from samples collected in nature.

The protein structure - in terms of amino-acid sequence - is spelled out in the virus genome.

Working out how a particular protein is going to fold can be done by computation - lots of it. You can help by downloading a back-ground process that runs on your home computer.

Finding a smaller protein that mimics the working end of the corona virus spike protein is a similar kind of problem. It's a special case of the common "lock-and-key" problem in drug design.

> This stuff about going after spikes and other obvious stuff is not the same.

Which is to say that you didn't understand what was being said.

> You read too much of that sycophantic PNAS stuff, like that dumb article about the quantum dot being used to study about 1% of the influenza replication sequence and making it out to be a really big deal.

Peer-reviewed articles are supposed to cite earlier relevant work and show how the work being reported relates to them. Imagining that this is sycophantic is just dumb.

Why you want to recall the quantum-dot stuff escapes me. Presumably you didn't understand that either, and think that your incomprehension indicates a problem with the work, rather than you.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, April 24, 2020 at 12:55:34 AM UTC+10, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:

On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 9:41:26 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, April 23, 2020 at 10:14:00 AM UTC+10, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 7:46:38 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 5:34:01 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
A coronavirus vaccine will "most likely" not be ready before the end
of 2021, according to the head of the world's second-largest
pharmaceutical company.

"I'm afraid that the most likely scenario is that we will not have a
vaccine before the end of next year," Severin Schwan, the CEO of
Roche, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday.
[...]

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-vaccine-probably-wont-ready-before-end-2021-roche-2020-4


We never have vaccines for common colds or AIDS because those mutate
every few weeks. We should know by now how often this one mutates,
so do we?

They haven't even developed a universal influenza vaccine. If this
similarly mutates into a bunch of strains each year, then it will be
with us forever.

What happened to the Spanish flu? No vaccine. Isn't that with us
forever?

Probably mutated in its animal reservoir to become noninfectious to humans. There may a chance the coronavirus will do the same, since it's predominantly an animal virus with just a very small percentage of the strains infectious to humans. They need to get it out of the human race first though. China will do its best to prevent that from happening.

I wonder why Fred thinks that. The Chinese enthusiasm for eating exotic wild animals will probably pick up a few new zoonoses from time to time, but the African enthusiasm for "bush meat" creates exactly the same problem.

You can eat infected meat until it comes out of your ears and you won't be infected. It's the people slaughtering and dressing the meat with direct contact with blood that are getting infected.

Perhaps.

> Viral infections from bushmeat, like HIV, are slow acting and take decades to kill their host.

HIV was one - very unusual - viral infection. Extrapolating from that to either viral infections isn't entirely logical.

The really bad stuff comes from eating rodents or being exposed to fecal material from rodents, like Ebola. And it's not just Africa. South America is full of similarly nasty germs.

The worst stuff almost always originates in rodents. Bats are the same family.

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0960982213011305?token=66A92051C9029487AAD4C80E99970FD42458A28F1843F92D1BA3E005766265082F60AA77A94C9173C5439C9A48C6FC0C

says otherwise. We are much closer to mice than we are to bats.

And viruses aren't too particular about what species they infect. Influenza comes from ducks.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney