Would it ever be possible, however, to create and distribute a vaccine 24 weeks faster — in six weeks instead of 30 weeks — and save more than 20 million lives?
For starters, the way we typically make flu vaccine is still pretty antiquated and hasn’t changed much in nearly 70 years.
We rely largely on hens’ eggs to incubate and replicate the virus, which is too slow of a process to respond rapidly to pandemic flu.
Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, told me that recent scientific advances, however, are fully transforming the speed at which vaccines can be developed and approved.
Genomic techniques can be used to map the DNA or RNA of a new pathogen, genetically to engineer and mass-produce the same DNA or RNA and then inject it into the human body, leading to the production of antibodies to fight the virus. This method results in a new type of vaccine, a DNA vaccine.
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