Covid Just Messed with the Wrong Team - by Chris Buck
I bet Covid wishes it could have given me serious brain damage. As I’ve outlined in the last few posts, seeing the strange and interesting dynamics of Covid infection firsthand has been sparking my creative imagination about how to kill the little bastards. One strategic victory a personified Covid might have thought it scored was when its multiple rebounds prevented me from flying to Italy for the annual Small DNA Tumor Virus Meeting - where I was slated to give a talk about a new vaccine approach being developed by two brilliant postdocs in our group, Safoura Soleymani and Amin Tavassoli. I’m increasingly imagining the new vaccine approach could be retooled for next-generation Covid vaccines. But the joke’s on Covid. My scientific partner Diana Pastrana delivered the talk in my place and colleagues report she knocked it out of the park. Sorry, Covid. We are still coming for you 1 .
The basic idea behind Amin and Safoura’s work is that if you don’t have to inject a vaccine using a needle then the usual time-consuming industrial-scale purification processes that require expensive equipment suddenly become unnecessary. If we could kick the expensive habit of using needles, we could theoretically have cheap food-grade vaccines. In a sense, the idea is simply harking back to older vaccines - such as early smallpox vaccines that were delivered intranasally or scratched into the skin - or oral polio vaccines that were sometimes delivered on a tasty sugar cube. In grad school I was taught that needle-free approaches only work because they use a live virus that’s capable of replicating and spreading to other tissues. That dogma has since been disproven by modern cholera vaccines, which consist of drinking some fluid that contains a harmless subunit of the cholera’s major toxin. Food-grade vaccines don’t have to be replication-competent.
