The NIH says it’s focused on whole-virus vaccines. What are they?

Earlier this month, the Trump administration said it ended $ 500 million in research on mRNA vaccines and focused on other approaches, including an “whole virus” vaccine platform announced above nicknamed “General Gold Standard”.

“Generation Gold Standard is a paradigm shift,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, in a press release in May praising the next research initiative. “It extends the protection against vaccines beyond the limits specific to the strain and is preparing for the viral threats of the flu – not only those of today, but also of tomorrow – using the technology of traditional vaccines brought to the 21st century.”

Vaccine experts and infectious diseases say, however, that the approach is wrong.

“It is sort of step backwards,” said Dr. James Campbell, vice-president of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on infectious Diseases. “We have inactivated whole virus vaccines for a very long time.”

The first whole virus vaccine was developed in the late 1800s by Louis Pasteur, which made a first version of the rabies vaccine.

“It’s not innovative at all,” said Angela Rasmussen, virologist at the University of Saskatchewan. “It is actually old, in a way, compared to vaccine standards.”

While other vaccines activate the immune system using specific proteins in viruses, whole virus vaccines generally preserve most of the viruse components.

“You take the virus, develop it, purify and kill it with an inactivating agent. It is a viral vaccine killed whole,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Philadelphia children’s hospital. Other whole virus vaccines use living but weakened viruses.

Campbell said that for many years of research on vaccines, scientists have been able to identify the parties of a virus that are most likely to activate the immune system and train it to combat an invasive pathogen. These parts are called “antigens”.

If the immune system is like body blood, monitoring invaders, then many more recent vaccination technologies that target specific antigens have blood with only the coins of the invader clothes that are most useful. A whole virus vaccine, on the other hand, would rather be like presenting a blood with the whole wardrobe of an invader.

Campbell said it can sound better at first glance to use the whole virus rather than key pieces, but that additional virus parts could do nothing to improve the immune response.

“For example, the hepatitis B vaccine is an antigen, the hepatitis B surface antigen, and it is almost 100% protective against hepatitis B. You don’t need hepatitis B virus,” he said.

Offer accepted. “The hepatitis B vaccine practically eliminated hepatitis B infections in young children,” he said. “So it’s pretty good.”

Campbell offered COVVI-19 vaccines as another example. “There were whole Virus Virus vaccines, but they were not used in the United States, they were used elsewhere, and if you look at the general protection on their part, it is not as good,” he said.

A Singapore study, for example, revealed that people who obtained an entire virus covid vaccine were more than 1.5 times to twice as likely to be infected than those which had been immunized by an mRNA vaccine which only targeted the advanced virus protein.

“If the whole virus vaccines killed for Covid were considered the best technology to move forward when the pandemic started, we would have,” said Campbell.

The poorly deployment of whole virus vaccines when they are not necessary are not only useless; In some cases, it can be harmful.

Campbell highlighted the development of the RSV vaccine as a case.

“When we used the entire virus killed the RSV vaccine many years ago, rather than protecting the children from the RSV, it led to what we call” the dependent improvement in antibodies, “he said. “The children had a worse RSV that if they had not been vaccinated, and it was because they had an entire virus inactivated by formalin.”

This trial on the RSV vaccine took place in the 1960s, and he retreated decades of research.

Since then, Campbell said, RSV vaccination has been directed only against the F protein, a piece of the virus, it has used a monoclonal antibody, which is like a preformed immune response. The first RSV vaccine was approved in 2023.

“They protect very well,” he said. “We don’t want to use the full virus vaccine for RSV. It will harm people. “

Some whole virus vaccines are still used. Hepatitis A vaccines and rabies are killed in whole virus vaccines, which means that they include the constitutive pieces of the virus that have been inactivated. Seasonal influenza vaccines also use whole virus technology.

Campbell said that it is possible for a whole virus vaccine to be an optimal choice for certain pathogens in the future.

In the pursuit of a universal influenza vaccine

But as to whether the entire virus platform will unlock new innovations in pursuing a universal flu vaccine, as the Ministry of Health and Social Services suggests, Campbell said that it would be possible to use whole virus vaccines if they could be genetically designed to express several flu antigens, but that does not have much to do with the entire vein.

“If it’s just a whole virus, and it’s a tension, that’s what we are doing now,” said Campbell.

Emily Hilliard, the HHS press secretary, said in a statement: “Generation Gold Standard marks a critical step in restoring strategic orientation and the radical transparency of American pandemic preparation.”

“Elaborated entirely by government scientists – without influence of industry – the BPL vaccine platform could offer a large long -term protection against all viral influenza pathogens, including flu and coronavirus, with the additional potential of blocking transmission and stopping epidemics at source,” said Hilliard. BPL, or beta-propiolactone, is a chemical that has been used for decades to kill viruses used in vaccines.

A universal influenza vaccine has been a long -standing goal for scientists, as it would ideally offer protection for years against flu. Due to the speed with which the Mute virus, annual shots are necessary to protect itself from the most common strains.

“There are a lot of different ways that people work, and if we only choose one – in particular a very old technology that people have tried so many times before and have failed to make a vaccine against universal flu – I think it puts all our eggs in a single basket and not really moving the ground,” said Campbell.

Offer said that withdrawn from research funding for mRNA vaccines could be particularly harmful in the event of a pandemic.

“If something wrong happens, as if there was a pandemic of flip-in birds, for example, we will be less prepared,” he said, adding that mRNA technology has a shorter production cycle than virus vaccines killed whole, which means that a mRNA vaccine would be available much earlier.

Rasmussen said: “We would probably need a year to evolve towards the complete manufacturing of the national scale” using an entire virus vaccine, adding: “You must actually develop a ton of viruses and then inactivate it and then ensure that it is inactivated.”

With other vaccine technologies, such as protein subunit or mRNA, “you simply do protein or mRNA, which can be done synthetically, without requiring viruses or anything to develop it,” she said. “They are much easier to change and adapt to the need, because new strains could emerge.”

Office said: “One of the 22 studies that were eliminated in this $ 500 million withdrawal examined how precious mRNA technology would be for bird flu.”

In the end, said Campbell, science should open the way, not descending dicta that binds the hands of scientists.

“The devil is in detail, not only in radical statements on the appropriate platform and what is not,” he said.

Several platforms are available for the development of vaccines, which are tested for their respective properties.

“Finally, one or two, perhaps, get up to be the best, and they are the ones that people continue to continue,” he said. “This is what we do in vaccinology, it is trying to understand what works and what does not work, both by fundamental science, by immunology, by models of diseases, before embarking on humans, then real human studies to compare and contrast the immune responses, security and protection, not only scannings on the platform.”