-Since January, when the coronavirus genome sequence
was made public, pharmaceutical companies have started
developing potential vaccines to immunize the public.
-Millions of doses have already been made, ready to go,
should the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine candidate
get regulatory approval.
-The vaccines in development work in different ways,
but they all have the same function.
Some are similar to a flu vaccine.
-When we want to elicit an immune response,
we give people a protein.
If we inject that into your arm, then your immune system
recognizes it and develops antibodies to that protein.
-But one type in particular, called an mRNA vaccine,
has shown promise in Pfizer and Moderna's preliminary trials.
-Messenger RNA is the exact instruction for the cell
how to build a protein.
-It's a lot faster process to generate an RNA
than it is to generate these kind of proteins
that are used for a vaccine,
so people could sort of shave off a few months
by producing the RNA.
-Here's how the vaccine would work.
Synthetic mRNA inside a lipid bubble enters your cells.
The mRNA tells the ribosomes how to generate copies
of the spike protein,
the signature crownlike structure of the coronavirus.
Your body sends antibodies to block the virus
as if you were infected,
but it would build your immunity against the virus in the future.
And unlike a flu vaccine,
which exposes you to a weakened form of the virus,
your body is manufacturing the protein of the virus.
-If there's literally mRNA through your body,
then your body can make the vaccine challenge by itself
and evoke the immune response.
And so it takes a long production step,
expensive production step,
out because mRNA is nuclear-type essence, nuclear essence.
You can synthesize that.
-Any coronavirus vaccine will have the same effect,
but RNA vaccines would be a huge step
for new vaccine technologies.
They have been in development for years,
but the Food and Drug Administration
has never approved their use in humans.
-We were actually setting out several years ago
to start making an influenza vaccine,
and we were very interested in using
and still are very interested in using RNA
to make the influenza vaccine,
'cause flu vaccines have to change constantly,
and it's much easier to change an RNA vaccine.
When the SARS coronavirus came around, our partners,
BioNTech, they simply, instead of swapping out one flu antigen
for another flu antigen,
they swapped out the flu antigen gene
and put in SARS coronavirus antigen.
-The fact that the technology had reached the stage
where people were really quite confident that it would work
and then, suddenly, we hit this international situation
where there was an imperative to go for it,
that kind of set up the situation
where this technology probably would have been
online within a decade anyway,
but it really kind of pushed us into doing it right now.
-Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer,
partnering with BioNTech,
and Moderna have both presented encouraging early data
about their mRNA vaccine trials.
-And we just received positive news in this fight
with the announcement
that there's been progress made toward a successful vaccine.
Soon, the expectation is, the FDA will run a process
of rigorous reviews and approvals.
-94% effective.
Now we have a second vaccine providing so much hope.
-John, indeed, these numbers are stunning,
Pfizer's vaccine showing very similar results.
-Of course, in the end, we will need science again
and scientists again to evaluate properly whether the enthusiasm
and the excitement currently is really justified.
-Any kind of new biomedical advance,
there is always kind of
a risk-benefit kind of calculation.
Any medical intervention
can sometimes have unforeseen consequences.
-While the results look promising, it does not mean
the pandemic will be ended by one single vaccine.
-We both have to get the data to prove this vaccine works
and we have to gain the public's trust and support,
although we have the data that says
the vaccine will work in them.
-The news about the Pfizer vaccine
and other vaccines that will be coming,
as well, is great,
but when we look at the number of doses that will be produced,
that degree of vaccination is going to be helpful,
but it's not really going to change very much
the number of people
who get infected or die in December and January
'cause there will be so few vaccinated at that point.
-I'm thrilled with the vaccine. -Right.
-But we won't have them for the most vulnerable Americans
until February.
Yes, the nursing homes will be vaccinated,
but there's 100 million Americans
that have these comorbidities
that put them at substantial risk.
-The CDC has recommended states vaccinate medical workers
and long-term-care-facility residents first,
but that's only a small portion of the public.
It'll be a monumental task to vaccinate
the rest of the US population.
Still, this vaccine is a huge step for mRNA technology.
-The most challenging aspects of it are delivery,
stability, favorable immune profile,
and those sorts of things would be the same for any RNA vaccine.
So once this is worked out, it should be easier
in the future to do other vaccines,
so it becomes possible that diseases that, in the past,
no one would have worked on
because they affect too few people,
might have benefit from this kind of technology development.
-And I give you this example from the Human Genome Project.
First-time sequence, what, $3 billion?
Now it costs $300, right?
So that's a major advance in the biosciences.
And I think chances are that
we will see something similar with vaccines.
Once you make one, you just have to change the sequence.
You don't have to change much else.
Once this breakthrough has come, I mean, there will be many more.