Dr. Steven Zeichner and his team at UVA began their research by thinking about the qualities they wanted in future vaccines -- then coming up with a way to fill that bill.
“A technology that can be used to make many different vaccines using the same underlying approach,” he explains.
Zeichner is a professor of pediatrics and microbiology. He says new vaccines must be affordable.
“The reason for that is we need vaccines not just for the rich countries of the world but also for the poor countries of the world, and that’s not altruism. That’s practicality.”
Because the next pandemic could start anywhere.
"Just as we have military bases around the world to protect us against aggression that could affect our homeland, we really need biomedical outposts around the world that can protect us against disease that could come and cause us harm, Zeichner says.
His team hopes to craft vaccines from ingredients that are easy to get – made in factories that are already in operation, and they should be easy to transport and store.
To develop their new approach, UVA scientists went back in time, updating a technology developed during the era of Louis Pasteur. He and other scientists discovered that germs cause disease and then found that injecting a person with a killed pathogen could prevent the illness.
"People thought, ‘Okay, maybe we can prevent those diseases, and the way we could do that is to identify the bacteria that causes it. We’ll grow that bacteria. We’ll kill it so it can’t harm a person, and then we’ll inject it back into a person to get their immune system to recognize that and make an immune response to recognize that."
This technology is still used to prevent many diseases including cholera and whooping cough, but Zeichner says his team made improvements using AI, man-made molecules and a modern understanding of the immune system.
Already, they’ve vaccinated laboratory animals against influenza, HIV and malaria, and they’re partnering with other schools to protect farm animals.
“We have a wonderful collaborator at Virginia Tech over in Blacksburg, Professor X J Meng, and he’s a world-renowned developer of animal vaccines, so X J and I have a project together that’s funded by the Department of Agriculture to make a pig vaccine, and we’re working with some folks at Ohio State to make an influenza vaccine for poultry.”
Once the new vaccines are proven effective in animals, the UVA team will need funding to test them in people, and getting federal grants is not easy.
"When you send an application to the NIH, only the top 30% are discussed by the evaluation committee. The rest are not discussed," he says with a rueful smile. "The code for that in the online spreadsheet is ND, so you can look down and have a very depressing long line of NDs."
But that is the nature of science -- the process of trial and error at every step, and Zeichner is hopeful this new approach to making fast, effective and inexpensive vaccines will be available in time to blunt the next pandemic.
