BlueDot biosecurity course & broad-spectrum vaccines

I’m on week/unit 5 of the BlueDot biosecurity course, the last one before the final project. I found the program interesting and I feel like I have been getting to learn the basics about pandemic prevention & management, as well as about technologies like metagenomic sequencing and far-UVC. I recommend it if you are generally interested in the space.

The sources in the course claim that there are currently only about ~200 people working full-time in this space (note: specifically from a catastrophic risk prevention perspective), which seems ludicrous for a problem area that could have such catastrophic consequences if not addressed, so it could really benefit from more specialized talent. BlueDot & co have also done an incredible job setting up all sorts of fellowships, accelerators and grant programs to help people onboard into the field, including rapid grants for small projects, and career transition support for those thinking of transitioning full-time.

I realized that there’s a lot of “mini-projects” (requiring few resources) that people with varied levels of experience and areas of expertise can take on to contribute to the field. This seems very aligned with our mission at Primordia and the Biopunk community, so I am currently brainstorming a biosecurity cohort. This would not have occurred to me if I had not enrolled into this program.

Yesterday I read this article on the state of vaccines + broad-spectrum vaccines. These are some of the highlights and things that surprised me:

• Even in the 1920s many Doctors believed that we would never be able to cure bacterial infections
  • In reality, with just a few innovations we were able to wipe out most of the common ones
• In most battles before the discovery and widespread adoption of antibacterials, bacterial infections were a bigger mortality factor than enemy attacks
  • i.e. ~50% of non-combat-related World War I deaths in the U.S. Army were due to infections
• The mechanism through which viruses “mutate” so rapidly is surprisingly just that the RNA polymerase that they use to replicate has a very high error rate when copying the genetic information
  • (DNA polymerase, the one used by our cells to replicate, is, comparatively, extremely stable, and even has some “proofreading” mechanisms to spot and remove most errors)
• Vaccine developers have to “predict” what the mainstream viral strain will be during the next wave 6-8 months in advance, to give manufacturers enough time
  • This can lead to situations like in 2014 when the mainstream flu vaccine only had ~20% efficacy (even on a good year, the efficacy tends to top at 60%)
• Some viruses like hepatitis C mutate so rapidly that they become “quasi-species” – infected hosts can host multiple species simultaneously
• The virus has two main parts (simplified explanation), let’s call them the “head” and the “stem”. The “head” pops up so it’s easy to target, but it’s also the part that mutates most rapidly. The “body”, however, holds the most fundamental structures holding the virus together, so it is mostly stable (viruses with big mutations here can’t “survive”) (well, viruses are not technically alive). The trick is to target this more stable (a.k.a “conserved”) part.
• The immune system has a very annoying quirk, with an even quirkier name (“the antigenic sin”): if you come at it with just a slight variation of a pathogen it has previously built defenses for, it will default to deploying those same defenses instead of building new better-matching ones, even if they’re way less efficacious.
• The idea with broad-spectrum vaccines is to try to inoculate patients with enough variations, or a “generic”-enough versions of a virus (or something that mimics it), that the body builds up a wide-enough variety of defenses to fight whatever future mutations it encounters
  • Ideally, we could equip patients with broad-enough generic versions of a vaccine/virus sample to protect them against a wide variety of them
• Interesting: there’s nasal spray vaccines in the pipeline! The idea is that you can easily prevent infections from airborne viruses if you can build up defenses in the respiratory pathways.