We’re familiar with the role of vaccines in preventatively treating conditions like measles and polio. But there’s a lot more to it than that, especially these days as high-tech systems help us to evolve how vaccines work.
There is the obvious example of developing mRNA vaccines for Covid. But there are other kinds of groundbreaking work that are going on around vaccines, and a lot of new science based on the capabilities that we now have with artificial intelligence.
Dr. Ofer Levy is the Director of the Precision Vaccine Center at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“Vaccines are really for protection,” he said in a recent TED talk around what’s going on with vaccine research, “but there are challenges to realize the full benefit of immunization. You can design the best vaccine in the world. If people don’t want to take it, it’s not going to help them. So vaccine attitudes are an important topic. Some vaccines require multiple doses to fully protect. That’s a challenge. And of course, infections are most severe in the very young and in elders, when the immune system is relatively weaker, and those are the populations, it’s more challenging to protect as well.”
Going back to the first vaccine developed by Jenner in 1796, Levy detailed how vaccines have been used over the last 20 years to prevent over 300 million illnesses, 21 million hospitalizations and over 700,000 deaths.
In discussing the best ways to introduce new vaccines, Levy noted that the response of each patient group is also unique.
“One size does not fit all,” he said.
Bio-banks, Adjuvant and Endotypes
As I listened to Levy‘s talk, I found myself wondering about some of the terms. He referenced a human bio-bank, which is essentially a repository for specimens that can be used in vaccine research. He mentioned adjuvants, which are additions to a vaccine that can enhance the main ingredient that helps develop an antigen.
And he mentioned endotypes, which are a sub-type of a health condition that can be useful in this research to determine how best to introduce vaccine elements to the body. There are also phenotypes, or signs and symptoms that manifest differently in different individuals. Scientist sometimes define the endotype as the “mechanistic pathway” leading to the condition or phenotype.
What Does the Precision Vaccine Center Do?
Levy also described his department this way:
“It’s a multi-disciplinary academic program that uses innovative approaches to discover and develop precision vaccines tailored to vulnerable populations,” he said. “These approaches include targeted clinical trials in diverse populations, diverse age, ethnicity, race and geography, and it also includes using systems biology technologies that can measure the entire inventory of cells and molecules in the body before and after a vaccine is given, because, in reality, most vaccines were discovered by trial and error, not by rational design. So using these cutting-edge technologies, we can now characterize the molecular response to a vaccine, and correlate that (to something) like safety as well as immunogenicity, the ability of the vaccine to induce a protective antibody level.”
He mentioned a program named MEMPHIS, and the use of in vitro systems to research vaccine efficacy.
“Could we create vaccines that require fewer doses and that might also protect against a broader range of microbial variants?” Levy asked. “Can we create vaccines that redirect immune development away from immune diseases such as asthma and allergy?”
Opioid Prevention
In addition to all of this, scientists are using vaccine technology to take aim at a very public American epidemic, where scientists estimate that one million Americans have died of fentanyl overdoses. Levy explained that there is now an “opioid vaccine” under development that will work on people with the biggest chance of developing an opioid addiction.
“The vaccine would be given to people who are at higher than average risk of an opioid overdose,” he explained. “It would induce antibodies against fentanyl in their blood, and if they were subsequently exposed to fentanyl, the antibodies would bind it and prevent it from penetrating into the brain, where it causes suppression of respiration and death.”
All of this is very relevant to how we’re pursuing healthcare today. It’s not just a question of making sure smallpox or measles stay eradicated. There’s cutting-edge research on new vaccines that cover a lot more ground in terms of promoting longevity and quality of life for the average patient.
Let’s see how this kind of work continues through this year as AI keeps developing.
