The Silver Lining of this Pandemic.

Every Cloud has a Silver lining. So also this dreadful Pandemic has one.

This Pandemic has compressed the period of making a vaccine from the usual 10 years to a mere 10 months.

The Virus story

Why at all a virus has to infect us ?

Because a virus doesn’t have any asset except a line of code. It needs a full printing set up to print all the copies of the code into its daughter cells. And our cells are fully equipped for the same.

For example, everyday our body needs some twenty thousand proteins to run its show daily. Take the example of Insulin. Insulin is a protein. It needs to be manufactured at the right quantity at the right time and must be supplied to the right destination. A glitch anywhere in this process will lead to Diabetes. All the enzymes that we need to digest the delicacies we partake every day are proteins. Even the rods and cones in our eyes require specific proteins to be synthesised at appropriate quantity at right time to give us vision.

So each cell of our body contains millions of printers ready with cartridges to 3D-print these 20000 odd proteins any time. The Viruses take over these logistics and push their own codes to synthesise their own items though in a hurry.

During the first 72 hours, when the virus is busy overtaking our logistics, our body gets a bit confused. Who is it that using my logistics so confidently? Is it a friend or foe ? Has it got the authority to use my printers. During this 72 hours we may feel some body pain, a little feverishness, chills and headache. This is common to all viral fevers including Covid-19.

The Fight back.

Our body’s reconnaissance system is extremely smart . It eventually picks up the culprit, studies the code it is using, detects that it is a threat and sets up powerful antibodies ( another type of proteins) to neutralise them. In 99% cases, the threat is neutralised. We recover from the viral fever. This is the second week.

What is important, our system remembers the threat for rest of our life. The immunologic memory. Next time the virus is encountered, it is annihilated double quick. But sometimes it may happen that the virus overwhelms our system and the system is neutralised. The virus wins.

The Vaccine Story

In 1796, Edward Jenner thought what if we can mimic a mild virus entry into our body and induce our own body to jump start the defence. A virus load that is sufficient enough to create antibodies but not large enough to run a full fatal course of disease. Those volunteers who were injected with mild doses of real virus, suffered from mild pox. Eventually all of them got completely immunised against pox for the rest of their life. A miracle.

World’s First case of Vaccination story makes an amusing read.:-

” Edward Jenner the British doctor had an attractive milkmaid girl who was very proud of her face. It was the dreaded small pox era. Half of the society’s high ladies in his county had their faces disfigured by the ugly pock marks due to small pox.
So he followed the maid to her shed and found that none of them had suffered from Pox. Why ?
“It is the pox in our fingers that we regularly get while milking the cow protects us from human pox.” They all said.

This was the first lesson on vaccination ever imparted to anyone in our planet.

Next time Jenner scraped some pus from the fingers of the milkmaid and injected it to his gardener ’s son. Lo and behold, the boy though suffered from a mild fever immediately but was protected from the dreadful diseasese.
Cows are called Vacca in Latin. Edward Jenner introduced our world to a new word- Vaccination.
It took another 75 years to eradicate Small Pox from the face of earth. Our instrument- the Small Pox Vaccine.

The Polio Story

Polio is a disease of children. In those days, sprightly, playful toddlers will have fever one evening and next day would wake up with paralysis for the rest of their life. In 1950s schools would remain closed during the polio season. Public places were quarantined. Parents rich and poor were living in terror. At sundown, they would close all doors and windows and plug any holes in them lest Polio would sneak in the night and infect their kids. Such was the paranoia.

It took decades of research to come out with a successful plan to control the epidemic. Vaccination, but a bit different from Jenner’s concept.

Jonas Salk thought it would be outrageous to inject live virus into toddlers. So why not kill the virus before injection? Salk’s killed polio vaccine was a resounding success. Today, Polio has been eradicated from the world except two countries. Pakistan and Afghanistan..

Covaxin of Bharat Biotech, a Hyderabad based Indian company is such a killed virus vaccine and is now undergoing human trial in India. Human trial always takes time. Why ?

The Covid Story

Normally it takes at least 10 years to come up with a vaccine against an existing virus. First the virus has to be injected into an animal. We don’t know which animal would accept the virus. Usually it is a mice or monkey. Their genetic system is closest possible to humans though a chimp would be much closer. But chimps are rare. Monkeys exaggerate and mice lie. Years of animal studies of vaccine can not predict success in humans. It has to be followed by human trial. The three stages of human trials are fraught with ethical, medical dilemma. Often billions of dollars so invested may be washed away by one single neurological side effect uncovered during human trials.

But today in less than 240 days, we have two new vaccines battle ready against Covid-19. Both of them are said to have 95% efficacy. In the vaccine world this is no less than a miracle.

How was it possible ?

The mRNA story

Earlier we have seen how the virus pushes its code to 3D print all of its component proteins in our cell. It then assembles them to release a million copy of daughter cells. These daughter cells further infect fresh cells and the whole process is repeated on and on. The nucleic acid codes are universal. In case of Covid-19 they are RNA. In life on this planet, all the genetic informations are kept in triplet codes of Nucleic acids. In human bodies, these genetic informations are kept inside a vault- the Nucleus ( lest they might be hacked) in double strands of nucleic acids called DNA . But Proteins are printed outside the nucleus in the ribosomes. There has to be a messenger system that shuttles between the D N A inside the vault
and ribosomes outside carrying the specific code. The mRNA.

The Novel Approach

Our scientists this time have hacked the viral Gene to format a mRNA in our lab that codes accurately for the spike protein of the Covid virus. Technically if this engineered m R N A is injected into our cells they will start printing only the spike protein of the virus in our body. So we will have plenty of this viral spike protein to circulate inside our body without even getting infected by the real virus.

Rest is easy to imagine. Our own immune system will pick up this newly synthesised protein as a foreign protein and within 2-3 weeks start producing antibodies. For a full proof option we are going to repeat a second dose after an interval of 3 – 4 weeks.

End Game

As the phase three human trial results pour in, we now know that our strategy has been a resounding success. Both the mRNA vaccines have near 95% efficacy. While the traditional influenza vaccines confer only 60-70% effectivity.

In both the trials, we have been able to bypass the animal phase of trial due to modelling in computer. That has saved us half a decades time. The researchers are so confident about the computer model that they have run through the human trials of 30000 to 40000 persons in record time. Planning, recruitment and design of the trials have been extremely meticulous and results are miraculous. This alone has saved us another half a decade time.

Here’s an example. While the first oral polio vaccine was ready by 1948, it got the final nod only in 1960. 12 years. Today while the genome of corona virus was sequenced for the first time in Europe on January 29, 2020, the vaccines have completed the human trial by 24th of November with 95% efficacy. 10 years has been compressed into 10 months. That is the greatest miracle of the present century.

Today we no longer have to kill a pig to get a vial of insulin as Dr William Bantig had to do in 1920s. We can churn out millions of insulin vials in a fraction of second from an assembly line of E Coli.

In the same way, in the near future, vaccines will trundle out of computers as soon as a novel virus emerges. We now have the Alladin’s Magic Lamp in our hand.- the mRNA.

That is the only Silver Lining of this pandemic.