A few ideas that I’ve written about stand out among all the others. Transcendent ideas that form the foundation of the future. Most of these headline grabbing ideas you are probably already intimately familiar with: Artificial Intelligence, 3-D Printing, Genetic Editing, Virtual Reality, Driverless Cars, the Blockchain, the Internet of Things, etc. But there’s another idea that could wind up being even more important in the long run: Synthetic Biology; the practice of re-engineering living organisms and imbuing them with new abilities.
Such technology could let us “grow” chairs instead of building them or give us the ability to create food packaging that changes color based on freshness. It could also let us create a vaccine for COVID-19. A living vaccine.
MIT Technology Review explains:
“Now, researchers say, synthetic biology has led to a way to create a weakened form of the pandemic coronavirus that causes covid-19. Although the idea remains a long-shot in the vaccine race, an attenuated coronavirus could be formulated into inexpensive nose drops for use around the world.
The startup company behind the new version of SARS-CoV-2, called Codagenix, is working with Serum Institute of India, based in Pune, which bills itself as the world’s largest vaccine maker. Plans are for the first volunteers to sniff up the synthetically designed virus starting in November, in initial human safety tests in the UK.
The most advanced covid vaccine candidates, including those from AstraZeneca and Moderna Pharmaceuticals, expose a person to only one part of the virus, the crown-shaped ‘spike’ that gives it its name, in order to generate antibodies.
The potential advantage of a vaccine using an attenuated live strain is that the body will encounter—and be able to react to—the entire virus. People will ‘catch’ it through their nose, and it will even grow inside them. In theory, that could prompt the formation of not just antibodies but also T cells and specialized forms of immunity in the nasal passage, leading to broader protection.
It might seem scary to imagine getting infected by the coronavirus on purpose, but attenuated-virus vaccines are common. The kids’ flu vaccine FluMist has a weakened influenza virus in it. And Serum Institute sells 750,000 doses a year of vaccines using live measles. The only disease ever successfully eradicated from the globe, smallpox, was wiped out with shots of a live virus…”
The article further explains how the process works:
“Viruses, which hijack cells to copy their proteins, have, predictably, evolved a taste for the same codons that human cells prefer. But evolution’s choices can be reversed in the laboratory, in a process Codagenix calls ‘deoptimization.’ Coleman says the company has made versions of the coronavirus whose genes are peppered with 240 mutations that endow it with some of the worst-performing codons.
The result: the engineered virus looks exactly the same on the outside but has a ‘virtual brake pedal’ inside, causing it to replicate much less quickly. The coronavirus can usually make 100 million copies of itself inside a cell in about a day, but Coleman says the deoptimized version will copy itself half as well in the lab. Inside a person, it could be less efficient by a factor of up to 1,000, giving the immune system time to respond.”
Essentially, all of this means that we can use synthetic biology to engineer vaccines that are just as effective, if not more so, than traditional vaccines and in just a fraction of the time. This could not only lead to a vaccine for COVID-19 but a pathway towards following similar processes to cure other illnesses and diseases. The Dawn of a New Era of healthcare is upon us. The Era of Synthetic Biology. Buckle up.
Leave a comment