OUR BEST SHOT

Around the world, scientists are developing vaccines for Covid-19, with some banking on using mRNA, a brand new technology, to get us there faster

- STEPHEN BURANYI

In January 2019, Robin Shattock, head of mucosal infection and immunity at Imperial College London, gave a talk to the World Economic Forum in Davos in which he argued that in a world under threat by “Disease X” – a term used by the World Health Organization and epidemiologists to describe an unanticipated and fastmoving epidemic with no known treatment – we needed to “completely reimagine the way we make vaccines for outbreaks and pandemics.”

Alongside clean water, he said, vaccines are the public health advance that underwrites our increasingly dense, interconnected world. And yet, vaccine timelines are still measured in years, or even decades. (A study in 2013 found that the average vaccine took 10.71 years from conception to completion.) In the event of an outbreak, the response would be slow. You would have a situation where people were dying, and no way to deliver a vaccine in a “meaningful timeframe”.

Shattock’s group at Imperial is one of a handful of teams worldwide working on an experimental type of vaccine called mRNA vaccines, which use simple synthetic messages written in genetic code to incite an immune response. These are theoretically faster to develop and cheaper to manufacture than traditional vaccines, and are potentially ready to respond to a threat in months, rather than years.

When Shattock spoke, no one knew when the next pandemic would strike, and while there had been some minor pharmaceutical and government interest in mRNA vaccine technology, it was still years away from being ready. “It didn’t make a very big splash then,” Shattock says. A year later, times have changed.