While the world is crowing about Margaret Keenan, a 90-year old Irish-British grandmother of four, being the first in the world to receive a coronavirus vaccine yesterday, on Tuesday, December 8, 2020, around 0630 local time (GMT) – she received the version collaboratively developed by the American company Pfizer and German company BioNTech – the American biotechnology company Moderna, in Massachusetts, had long had a vaccine developed.
Moderna had already designed a COVID-19 vaccine – mRNA-1273 – by January 13.
It was only recently, on November 16, that they reported a 94.5% efficacy rate.
Moderna developed their vaccine only two days after the genetic sequence had been publicized internationally by Chinese researcher Professor Dr. Yong-Zhen Zhangm Ph.D. His humanitarian act of scientific generosity resulted in him being temporarily forced out of his lab.
Professor Dr. Zhang believes science holds the key to predicting viral outbreaks with similar accuracy as with which we now anticipate typhoons and tornadoes. He said, “If we don’t learn lessons from this disease, humankind will suffer another.”
Moderna’s vaccine design only took one weekend to develop at their Massachusetts facilities.
In fact, Moderna had completed development of their COVID-19 vaccine mRNA-1273 before the Chinese government had acknowledged the disease was transmitted by human-to-human means, and more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States – January 21.
And by the time the first American coronavirus death was reported a month later, on February 29, Moderna’s mRNA-1273 coronavirus vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health to begin its Phase I clinical trial.
All of that was long before the President had made any announcement about his “Operation Warp Speed,” the public-private partnership to develop a coronavirus vaccine, and yet even 2 months before Bloomberg News reported on April 29 that such a plan was in the works.
Regarding the announcement of the first known coronavirus-related death, it should be noted that, following autopsy results in mid-to-late April, the Santa Clara County California Medical Examiner’s office reported on April 21 that the first known COVID-19 related death occurred in United States on February 6. The first death was previously thought to have occurred in Kirkland, Washington on February 29. The New York Times reported that, “The virus has an incubation period of 14 days and people who die of it are often sick for at least three weeks, so the individual who died on February 6 could have been infected — and transmitting the infection to others — in early January, experts said.”
In essence, what that means, is that for the entire time the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has infected well over 15 million – and counting – in the United States, we had the tools we needed to prevent it, as well as the death of over 250,000 Americans… and counting.
So, that begs the question: If Moderna had a vaccine ready in January, why has it taken until now – December, very nearly a year later – to have a vaccine readily available?
Moderna, a publicly-traded company (stock symbol: MRNA) with operations and headquarters in Massachusetts, is a biotechnology firm focused exclusively upon development of vaccines using mRNA – messenger RNA. Their vaccine is the first in the history of vaccine development to use mRNA.
Drs. Emmanuelle Charpentier-L & Jennifer A Doudna-R, are 2020 Nobel laureates, and creators of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool
Vaccines made using mRNA are fundamentally different from any other vaccine ever made. The history of vaccination began on May 14, 1796, when a country doctor from Gloucestershire, England, Dr. Edward Jenner, MD, first took some fluid from a cowpox blister and scratched it into the skin of James Phipps, an 8-year-old boy.
Dr. Jenner developed his vaccine while he was still a medical student, after noticing that milkmaids who had contracted a disease called cowpox, which caused blistering on a cow’s udders, did not catch smallpox. However, unlike smallpox, which caused severe skin eruptions and dangerous fevers in humans which often led to death, cowpox led to few ill symptoms in those women.
Science has come a very long way since then. While traditionally, vaccines were first made using active, live, then attenuated, then inactivated, or dead cells from the organism or virus. Throughout the history, the process of making vaccines used chickens’ eggs for the protein they contained, and were literally injected into the shell of an egg. Some are still made that way.
Most recently, two women have forever changed health, medicine, and many other life sciences, which gives hope to millions, and holds untold promises. Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier, Ph.D., Director of Infection Biology at the Max Planck Institute, and Professor Dr. Jennifer A. Doudna, MD, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Professor in Biomedical and Health at the University of California Berkeley, in October 2020 won the Nobel prize in chemistry for the development of the revolutionary CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool which has been described as enabling “rewriting the code of life.”
Drs. Emmanuelle Charpentier-L & Jennifer Doudna-R, are the 2020 Nobel laureates in chemistry, and creators of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool.
Cas9 is a type of modified protein and acts like a pair of scissors that can cut parts of DNA strands. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, in essence, a repeating mirrored DNA sequence in genomes that repeats. The technology has worked in most every organism that it has been used on, including plants, animals, microbes and humans.
By using the gene editing platform CRISPR, which could be thought of as cut-and-paste, the idea is to remove parts of a genome using RNA as a means of guiding to a particular place within a genome, genes can then be modified to eliminate mutated, or harmful parts.
The ability to use such sophisticated gene splicing technology holds enormous promise.
As it relates to the coronavirus, the gene splicing technology uses a very small portion of messenger RNA (mRNA) from the coronavirus genome, and produces a gene that codes for the spike protein – the characteristic protruding part seen on images.
The coronavirus has 4 proteins, the spike is 1, and is the part that enables the virus to invade cells. By using only that part of the virus, it causes the body to produce antibodies that neutralize that spike protein. RNA vaccines cause the body to make only that spike protein. Then, encased in a fat molecule mRNA then enters cells, and sends a coded message to the body to make the protein, which in turn causes an immune response.
RNA vaccines have many advantages, which, unlike other vaccines produced other ways, they stimulate the production of killer T-cells which stop the coronavirus from replicating. And because mRNA vaccines are produced in test tubes or tanks, rather than being cultivated in cells (such as in eggs), they should be relatively quick and easy to produce.
The use of mRNA to treat disease, even genetic-based disease, such as cystic fibrosis, is brand new, but holds exciting possibilities. Moderna is perhaps one of the most promising mRNA therapeutics research firms in the world. And under the leadership and direction of Chief Science Officer Dr. Melissa Moore, Ph.D., Moderna has developed, and publicized, the scientific blueprint for a unique form of cancer therapy using mRNA which when used used, ensures its mRNA is made only inside cancer cells. Ryan Cross reported in Chemical and Engineering News on September 3, 2018 in “Can mRNA disrupt the drug industry? Messenger RNA technology promises to turn our bodies into medicine-making factories. But first Moderna—and a long list of old and new competitors—needs to overcome some major scientific challenges.” and wrote in part that, “Moderna scientist Ruchi Jain designed an mRNA that causes cancer cells to self-destruct but is recognized by, and destroyed in, healthy cells.”
Dr. Moore has a distinguished scientific pedigree, and Read the rest of this entry »
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