Less costly vaccines, developed faster
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, researchers developed lifesaving vaccines in less than a year—a record-breaking speed compared with the years required for previous vaccines. Steven Zeichner believes it could be possible to get that timeline down to weeks.
Zeichner, a professor of pediatrics and microbiology, immunology and cancer biology at UVA’s School of Medicine, leads a team of researchers who are refining a process—called a vaccine platform—with the potential to rapidly and inexpensively develop and produce new vaccines.
Their process involves three key steps.
First, the researchers identify which feature of the virus could be used to safely teach the immune system to recognize and fight off the disease.
Next, the team uses a groundbreaking AI tool called AlphaFold to rapidly model potential vaccine designs “and choose the ones that are likely to be effective before we make them,” Zeichner says. Once the researchers have settled on likely candidates, a bioscience company synthesizes the DNA sequences that encode the antigens and clones the DNAs into a plasmid, a small circle of DNA that can grow within bacteria and can place the vaccine protein on the surface of the bacteria. The company can return the completed plasmid within two weeks “at a very low cost,” Zeichner says. “With this platform, we can make many different vaccines over and over again, and each one only costs about $100 to create.”
Finally, the researchers put the plasmid into common bacteria. To make the vaccine, the lab then grows a batch of bacteria with the protein on its surface and inactivates the bacteria.
The low cost and ease of use of this vaccine-making platform mean that future vaccines could be affordably produced at mere cents per dose, even in the world’s poorest countries, Zeichner says. What’s more, they could be stored and transported at normal refrigerator temperature, making delivery to remote communities far easier. Zeichner adds that the platform “can be used over and over again for many different diseases.”
Recent research published by Zeichner’s team and co-authors has demonstrated that vaccines made using the system can induce a potent immune response. And some preliminary research is yielding encouraging evidence that the platform could one day be used to produce a universal flu vaccine, a variant-resistant coronavirus vaccine, or a vaccine against malaria. For now, however, the team is focused on fine-tuning the platform to ensure that the vaccines produced are able to induce the most beneficial immune response.
The UVA Licensing & Ventures Group has filed several patents on Zeichner’s work and, in a challenging research-funding climate, is exploring the possibility of starting a commercial company to seek venture capital funding. Zeichner says the initial goal for that company might be to establish the success of the platform first with veterinary vaccines, particularly for commercial livestock animals.
“There is a concept called ‘One Health,’” Zeichner says, “that means that you can’t think about animal health and human health in isolation.” Avian influenza, for example, has infected and devastated poultry flocks, spread to dairy herds and, more ominously, been diagnosed in a small number of people in close contact with these animals. “If we want to protect humans, we have to protect animals, and to protect animals you need a very inexpensive vaccine,” Zeichner says.
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