Exciting vaccine news.
On November 9, 2020, Pfizer released data
saying that there COVID-19 vaccine has so far shown at 90%
efficacy in preventing disease in their clinical trials, which
is amazing.
It's not the end of the road, but it's
a new kind of vaccine called an RNA vaccine, which I
am super excited to talk about.
So let's do that right now.
But I do want to throw a disclaimer on this video.
I am not a virologist or an immunologist
or an epidemiologist, but I am a geneticist,
and my thesis was focused on RNA silencing and sequencing.
So I do have a lot of experience thinking pretty deeply
about RNA and how it works.
And that's why I'm really, really
excited to talk about this story in particular.
So let's start really big picture.
There are a lot of different companies right now trying
to create vaccines against COVID-19.
The whole idea behind a vaccine is
that you expose someone to a dead or weakened form
of a pathogen, or to just a part of that pathogen,
so that their immune system can learn what it is
and how to fight it without actually
having to contract the disease.
And once you have a high enough level
of the population vaccinated, you
can slow down the spread of the disease
through herd immunity or community immunity.
Now, I created an hour long webinar
on vaccines with miniPCR bio that you can check out
in the card above or the description below
if you want a really deep dive into the history of vaccines,
how they work, and the many different strategies
that companies are taking right now to create COVID-19
vaccines.
So you can watch the whole thing over on their channel.
But briefly, different companies are taking different strategies
right now.
Some are using traditional strategies,
like dead versions of the virus to create vaccines,
others are using different harmless viruses
to deliver nucleic acids or proteins from the virus that
causes COVID-19 to people, but today, we're
going to talk about RNA vaccines.
RNA is a really important molecule in your body.
Over the years, we've learned that RNA
plays lots of jobs in our body and in our cells,
but one of the most important jobs
is to carry the instructions for making proteins
from the DNA in our nucleus out into the rest of the cell
where proteins are made.
So genes in our DNA are transcribed
into mRNA, or messenger RNA, which is then
translated into protein.
And this holds true for pretty much every living
thing on Earth.
Now, many viruses also have DNA genomes,
but some, like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,
have an RNA genome instead of a DNA genome.
But in the same way, the RNA encodes
proteins which help build things like the outer shell
of the virus, and something called a spike protein.
But the virus can't replicate on its own.
It needs to hijack some of the replication
machinery inside our own cells first before it
can make copies of its RNA and the proteins
that it needs to build more virus.
If you've seen pictures or drawings of SARS-CoV-2,
you'll likely recognize this spike protein.
It's what binds to receptors on our cells,
causing the cells to let the virus in.
And it's been the potential target
for many of the vaccines currently being developed.
The idea is that if we can show your body the spike protein
and allow it to create antibodies against it,
your body will be primed to fight and recognize
the full virus covered in those spike proteins
if you get infected.
And we can do this in different ways.
So again, we can produce a different, harmless virus
that's covered in these spike proteins
and give that to people as a vaccine,
or we can produce just the proteins themselves
and give those to people.
But an mRNA vaccine works differently.
It delivers just the RNA message of how
to build that protein to your cells,
then your own cells do the work of producing that protein,
displaying it on their cell surface,
and then developing an immune response to it.
And this is really cool.
It's using your own body to make the functional
part of the vaccine.
That's just like, really cool and really smart to me.
It also has a number of technical advantages.
So it's way cheaper and easier to make a lot of RNA
for vaccines than it is to have to grow and then kill
lots of the virus, or to build a new virus,
or to create lots and lots of a single protein in the lab.
It was also way easier for scientists
to get started designing this and working on it because they
didn't actually need to get a sample of the virus
to get started, they just needed a text file
of the virus's genome.
Vaccine development typically takes three
to five to 10 years.
It's a long process.
But this one has gone from start to near finish in
under a single year, in part due to how easy it
is to just make lots of RNA.
Another advantage an RNA vaccine is
that if we do need to change the vaccine slightly
in the future due to mutations in SARS-CoV-2,
it's just much easier to change and produce an RNA code
than it is to grow a bunch of new virus
or to make new proteins.
RNA vaccines can be delivered via a needle,
just like other vaccines we're used to, which is good.
And you can try and do an injection of just mRNA,
but you can sometimes run into problems
with enzymes in your body starting to break it down
before it does the work you want it to,
so many of the vaccines currently under development
are trying to package that RNA somehow for delivery.
As an example, at the Pfizer vaccine
that we're going to be talking about today
is packaged into lipid nanoparticles.
You can probably figure out what that is, nano for small,
lipid for fat, and particles for particles.
So the RNA is basically packaged into tiny fat bubbles
to help them more easily slip inside your cells.
There are potential drawbacks to RNA vaccines,
but we'll get to those in just a minute.
Research on mRNA vaccines has been going on for decades
but if this gets approved, it would be the first RNA vaccine
to be used in humans, though good progress has
been made on similar vaccines for Ebola, Zika, and rabies.
A company called Moderna also has a COVID-19 RNA
vaccine in late stage clinical trials as well.
So now, I want to talk about the Pfizer BioNTech
vaccine as an example because it's the first one that
shown such great promise.
It is November 12 when I'm recording this,
so unfortunately, we don't have the full data to go through
yet.
What we have right now is their press release.
But I do want to talk about what we know.
So their trial looked at about 44,000 people
split into two groups.
One group received the RNA vaccine in two doses,
and the other group received a placebo.
Again, what we have right now is their press release,
and this states that 42% of the participants
had diverse backgrounds, and I believe,
says that participants went from 12 to 85 years of age,
but I haven't seen a more detailed breakdown yet
on ancestry or age composition of the participants.
Now, between the two groups, so far,
there have been 94 lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19.
The majority of those were in the placebo group.
And based on the numbers we have so far,
it's probably around 80 something cases in the placebo
group, and only about nine in the actually vaccinated group.
From these 94 cases, they've calculated
that at seven days after the second dose of vaccine,
the vaccine was 90% effective at preventing COVID-19.
This is amazing.
I've been devouring vaccine news over the past few months,
and the experts I've been listening to we're
hoping for something like 60% efficacy.
90% is awesome.
And it's great not just because it
means that this vaccine is working,
but also because it means that the spike protein seems
to be a good target to create a vaccine against.
Since so many of the vaccines in development right
now are using this as a target, it's
pretty good news for a lot of the vaccines in clinical trials
right now.
But there are some things to remember.
Unlike some vaccines, this one requires two separate shots.
So if we're going to try and get everyone vaccinated,
we're going to need them to come back for a second shot three
weeks after the first one.
It also means that for every two doses produced,
you can only vaccinate one person.
And two, RNA is not the most stable molecule.
This vaccine needs to be kept at around minus 80 degrees
Fahrenheit.
That's super cold, and it has to be kept at cold from production
to delivery into your arm.
So that temperature is around the temperature of dry ice,
and there are lots of people working on the cold supply
chain, but it's going to require more effort
and more planning to get that vaccine to remote locations
than it would if it was stable at room temperature.
There are also some reported side effects
like aches and fevers, but that's
similar to many other vaccines too.
And so far, there have been no serious safety
concerns in the nearly 44,000 people who have received it.
So personally, I would take some aches and fevers
over getting COVID-19.
And additionally, the clinical trial isn't over.
They have a predefined final analysis point of 164 COVID-19
cases, so they need to continue the trial
and keep collecting data until that point.
So the actual efficacy rate might
change by the end of the trial.
We'll also need more time to see how long the protection
from the vaccine lasts.
Now, there are a lot of different analysis and stages
that the vaccines have to go through
before they're approved, and those are not
my area of expertise.
But I have linked some great resources below
that you can watch and read and listen
to if you want to find out more about how that vaccine goes
from potential to a final approved product.
It's really fascinating, but just not
the topic of today's video.
I also want to note that the data we have so far
is looking at the vaccine preventing disease,
not preventing infection.
Now, on one hand, this is good.
What we care about is people not getting the disease.
But we don't yet know if you could get the vaccine
and then still get the infection and pass it on to other people.
We just need more time.
Now, finally, I want to address two questions that I've already
gotten a few times already.
First, can this vaccine change my DNA if I get it?
And the answer is no.
There is no danger of that.
The RNA is translated into protein
in the cytoplasm of your cell.
It does not have to go into the nucleus where the DNA is,
and there is no risk of integration.
And RNA does break down after a while,
so your cells aren't just going to be indefinitely producing
the spike protein.
Another question you might have is
if I get the vaccine that has SARS-CoV-2 RNA,
can it make the virus?
Could I actually get COVID-19 from the vaccine?
And again, the answer is no.
So the vaccine just carries all part
of the virus's genetic material, just the part
that tells it how to make the spike protein.
So without all of the rest of the genome,
it does not have the instructions
to build more virus and create an infection.
The recipe is just not there.
Overall, this is good news, and I'm personally
really optimistic.
It's not the end of the road, but it is good news and sort
of a good indication that we might have available vaccines
early next year.
But what that means is that we still
need to be safe and careful.
We need to be social distancing, and we need to be staying home,
and we need to be wearing masks.
I know that it's been a long year.
I'm tired of staying home.
I'm tired of not seeing my friends and family.
I'm tired of being worried about getting others sick,
and I'm constantly worried about the health
of the people that I love and their financial security,
and their mental health.
But just because there is a vaccine on the horizon
doesn't mean we can all let up yet.
It means that if we can all stay safe and healthy for just
a little bit longer, there might be
an end to this thing in sight.
So we can all help get us to that healthy future
by wearing masks and social distancing
and getting a vaccine when one is available.
Nobody is an island in this, and if we're
going to get through it, we're going
to get through it together.
So I'll get off my soapbox now, but please,
please do your part to help keep all of us
healthy for just a little bit longer.
A huge thank you again to my Patreon patrons
who really do make it possible for me to try and get
information like this out quickly
and help you try and navigate the news a little bit.
I could not do this without your support,
both emotional and financial.
So thank you so, so much.
Stay put and do science.
But I'm optimistic that soon, we'll
be going forth and doing science.