Designing A Better COVID19 Vaccine with Nikolai Eroshenko

Could all the leading COVID19 vaccines have a fatal flaw in their design? A dizzying number of vaccines are being developed to protect society from the dangers of COVID19, each with its own benefits and pitfalls. At HelixNano, Nikolai Eroshenko and his team are designing a special type of vaccine with increased attention to ensuring that this protective medicine doesn't accidentally improve the virus's ability to infect cells or drive the immune system to cause collateral damage. Nikolai describes how vaccines work, why so many are being developed to fight SARS-CoV-2, and how technological advances have allowed us to develop them faster than ever before. Most importantly, Nikolai calls on all vaccine developers to put more effort into their design and testing pipeline such that they don’t accidentally help the virus become more deadly. 

About the Author

Nikolai earned his PhD under Professor George Church, one of the founding fathers of synthetic biology. The lab is renowned for developing high throughput methods to design, build, and test bioengineered parts.The technology Nikolai designed in the Church lab was spun out into a company, HelixNano, to design next-generation vaccines to treat and prevent cancer.When the COVID19 pandemic hit, Nikolai and HelixNano made an all-hands-on-deck pivot to create a COVID19 vaccine without the possibility of triggering antibody-dependent enhancement, an effect that can cause a vaccine to increase the deadliness of SAR-CoV-2.

Key Takeaways

Vaccines train an immune response by creating specialized T cells and antibodies that protect people from future infections of the virus.A mechanism called antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE, could allow current vaccines to accidentally help SARS-CoV-2 infect people who have received it.Nikolai calls on vaccine developers to improve their measurement capabilities so that they can catch the potential for ADE early.The current boon of new biotechnology has allowed us to test and measure the effectiveness and safety of these lifesaving technologies faster than ever before.

Translation

Nikolai and his team focus on one specific type of vaccine that uses RNA to elicit an immune response.Using RNA allows for fast design-build-test cycles that HelixNano uses to rapidly screen for novel vaccine properties.HelixNano is developing a vaccine that is specifically designed to minimize the chance of ADE.

First Author: Nikolai Eroshenko

Paper: Implications of antibody-dependent enhancement of infection for SARS-CoV-2 countermeasures. Nature, 2020.

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