Slightly off-topic, but I don't have any other good forum to ask that.
Once we are done with COVID, will the new vaccine methods enable us to develop vaccines for virus that we couldn't do before. E.g. maybe HIV?
Once we are done with COVID, will the new vaccine methods enable us to develop vaccines for virus that we couldn't do before. E.g. maybe HIV?
The number of mutations is proportional to the number of people currently infected. The faster the virus spreads the more variants will be created. The fact that the N501 variant spreads faster seems to imply that the rate of mutations is already in the process of accelerating.
It may make more sense to use evolutionary modeling and analysis of existing SARS-type viruses to create antigens robust to all expected mutations. Here’s one such bit of research: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.17.387092v2
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech:
It develops pharmaceutical candidates based on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) for use as individualized cancer immunotherapies, as vaccines against infectious diseases and as protein replacement therapies for rare diseases, and also engineered cell therapy, novel antibodies and small molecule immunomodulators as treatment options for cancer.
HIV, like other retroviruses, embedds itself in the cell DNA.
Some cells remain dormant for weeks and then start producing virions.
So the other problem with HIV, even if it didn't attack immune cells, is the hidden virus reservoir, I guess, just like other incurable viruses, like herpes and some hepatitis.
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/11/18/194889...
If you take antiretrovirals you're very unlikely to become infected with HIV, even if you take it after initial exposure (but do your own research on that), but as soon as you stop, you lose that protection -- same with antibodies (not sure how a vaccine would help T-cell immunity if HIV infects T-cells).
This is both true for natural infection and first generation vacines.
Later generation vaccines avoid this by not presenting certain proteins.
My point is, you can't just include hundreds of protein variants without a lot of trials.
In the optimal case you would attempt the 100+ cocktail and don't have any unreasonable side effects from them. Of course if there is a single variant in there that causes side effects you would need a ton of trials to triangulate which one causes them, but there is no guarantee that that is necessary or that you wouldn't run into that variant when you just adding 5 new variants in an iteration.