Thread by @ArielBlocker

Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci: German 'dream team' behind vaccine

Next yaer’s ⁦@NobelPrize⁩ for Medicine?!! theguardian.com/world/2020/nov…

Honestly @NobelPrize, please consider their achievement seriously for an award. Two aspects represent truly giant leaps for vaccine & drug development: 1) use of nucleic acids as a source of immunogen production; 2) safe parallelisation of aspects of development & clinical trials

1) is important because nucleic acid chemistry and enzymatic expansion are much easier and more predictable & reproducible than for conventional proteins, be they recombinant or inactivated virus. This means that once conversion of production lines is achieved, producing billions

of doses may be considerably and cheaper. Only draw back I can see right now is -70oC storage requirement which is I assume to prolong mRNA integrity? But perhaps that can be solved in time by using much more stable DNA to undergo both transcription and translation in patients?

2) is important because safely compacting development and clinical trials, from 5-15 years to <1yr will save 100s of 1000s of lives now, reduce development costs considerably (which hopefully end users will actually see!) and may even be applicable to other vaccines and drugs.

Excellent 2018 review for those wishing to learn more about mRNA vaccines quickly, as I did:
nature.com/articles/nrd.2…

Quoting from this paper: “Its reaction yield and simplicity make rapid mRNA production possible in a small GMP facility footprint. The manufacturing process is sequence-independent and is primarily dictated by the length of the RNA, the nucleotide and capping chemistry and...

the purification of the product; however, it is possible that certain sequence properties such as extreme length may present difficulties.

According to current experience, the process can be standardized to produce nearly any encoded protein immunogen, making it particularly suitable for rapid response to emerging infectious diseases”. Indeed!! 🤩😍🤩🤓🤩😎🤩

Some final thoughts: the highest level reached by mRNA vaccines in clinical trials prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was phase IIb. This alone probably explains why Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci chose to reorient their entire company from anti-cancer vaccines to that against COVID-19.

Some final thoughts: the highest level reached by mRNA vaccines in clinical trials prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was phase IIb. This alone probably explains why Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci chose to reorient their entire company from anti-cancer vaccines to that against COVID-19.

In late January 2020 they knew they had mastership of an approach that could save many lives in this pandemic. But they also realised that this was probably their once in a lifetime chance to go to Phase III and beyond, to move mRNA vaccines from PoCs to accepted approach.

In late January 2020 they knew they had mastership of an approach that could save many lives in this pandemic. But they also realised that this was probably their once in a lifetime chance to go to Phase III and beyond, to move mRNA vaccines from PoCs to accepted approach.

This is because to finalise and scale up GMP production to go into PhIII costs so much more money when GMP protocols are so different to existing ones, clinical trials must be designed anew to address potential safety and efficacy issues with an entirely new type of immunogen....

...ONLY a near guaranteed & very look large financial RoI will attract the big Pharma heavyweights, such as @Pfizer here, who control the world’s GMP production plants & their remodelling & alone have enough financial stability & expertise to invest in a complicated PhIII trial.

Many congratulations to @BioNTech_Group & @pfizer_news staff!!! It ought be a lesson to racist covidiots such @realDonaldTrump that an American Pharma giant succeeded faster than #Warpspeed by allying itself with two 1st gen. immigrants from primarily a Islamic country, Turkey.😁

theguardian.com/business/2020/…