The Virus and the Vaccine


Book Description

Jonas Salk's polio vaccine has taken on an almost legendary quality as a medical miracle, for it largely eradicated one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century. But the story of the vaccine has a dark side, one that has never been fully told before... Between 1954 and 1963, close to 98 million Americans received polio vaccinations contaminated with a carcinogenic monkey virus, now known as SV40. A concerted government effort downplayed the incident, and it was generally accepted that although oncogenic to laboratory animals, SV40 was harmless to humans. But now SV40 in showing up in human cancers, and prominent researchers are demanding a serious public health response to this forgotten polio vaccine contaminant. A gripping medical detective story, The Virus and the Vaccine raises major questions about vaccine policy.




Immunization Safety Review


Book Description

The Immunization Safety Review Committee was established by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to evaluate the evidence on possible causal associations between immunizations and certain adverse outcomes, and to then present conclusions and recommendations. The committee's mandate also includes assessing the broader societal significance of these immunization safety issues. While all the committee members share the view that immunization is generally beneficial, none of them has a vested interest in the specific immunization safety issues that come before the group. The committee reviews three immunization safety review topics each year, addressing each one at a time. In this fifth report in a series, the committee examines the hypothesis that exposure to polio vaccine contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40), a virus that causes inapparent infection in some monkeys, can cause certain types of cancer.




A Shot to Save the World


Book Description

"An inspiring and informative page-turner." –Walter Isaacson Longlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award The authoritative account of the race to produce the vaccines that are saving us all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Solved the Market Few were ready when a mysterious respiratory illness emerged in Wuhan, China in January 2020. Politicians, government officials, business leaders, and public-health professionals were unprepared for the most devastating pandemic in a century. Many of the world’s biggest drug and vaccine makers were slow to react or couldn’t muster an effective response. It was up to a small group of unlikely and untested scientists and executives to save civilization. A French businessman dismissed by many as a fabulist. A Turkish immigrant with little virus experience. A quirky Midwesterner obsessed with insect cells. A Boston scientist employing questionable techniques. A British scientist despised by his peers. Far from the limelight, each had spent years developing innovative vaccine approaches. Their work was met with skepticism and scorn. By 2020, these individuals had little proof of progress. Yet they and their colleagues wanted to be the ones to stop the virus holding the world hostage. They scrambled to turn their life’s work into life-saving vaccines in a matter of months, each gunning to make the big breakthrough—and to beat each other for the glory that a vaccine guaranteed. A #1 New York Times bestselling author and award-winning Wall Street Journal investigative journalist lauded for his “bravura storytelling” (Gary Shteyngart) and “first-rate” reporting (The New York Times), Zuckerman takes us inside the top-secret laboratories, corporate clashes, and high-stakes government negotiations that led to effective shots. Deeply reported and endlessly gripping, this is a dazzling, blow-by-blow chronicle of the most consequential scientific breakthrough of our time. It’s a story of courage, genius, and heroism. It’s also a tale of heated rivalries, unbridled ambitions, crippling insecurities, and unexpected drama. A Shot to Save the World is the story of how science saved the world.




The Vaccine


Book Description

Winners of the Paul Ehrlich Prize The dramatic story of the married scientists who founded BioNTech and developed the first vaccine against COVID-19. Nobody thought it was possible. In mid-January 2020, Ugur Sahin told Özlem Türeci, his wife and decades-long research partner, that a vaccine against what would soon be known as COVID-19 could be developed and safely injected into the arms of millions before the end of the year. His confidence was built upon almost thirty years of research. While working to revolutionize the way that cancerous tumors are treated, the couple had explored a volatile and overlooked molecule called messenger RNA; they believed it could be harnessed to redirect the immune system's forces against any number of diseases. As the founders of BioNTech, they faced widespread skepticism from the scientific community at first; but by the time Sars-Cov-2 was discovered in Wuhan, China, BioNTech was prepared to deploy cutting edge technology and create the world’s first clinically approved inoculation for the coronavirus. The Vaccine draws back the curtain on one of the most important medical breakthroughs of our age; it will reveal how Doctors Sahin and Türeci were able to develop twenty vaccine candidates within weeks, convince Big Pharma to support their ambitious project, navigate political interference from the Trump administration and the European Union, and provide more than three billion doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to countries around the world in record time. Written by Joe Miller—the Financial Times’ Frankfurt correspondent who covered BioNTech’s COVID-19 project in real time—with contributions from Sahin and Türeci, as well as interviews with more than sixty scientists, politicians, public health officials, and BioNTech staff, the book covers key events throughout the extraordinary year, as well as exploring the scientific, economic, and personal background of each medical innovation. Crafted to be both completely accessible to the average reader and filled with details that will fascinate seasoned microbiologists, The Vaccine explains the science behind the breakthrough, at a time when public confidence in vaccine safety and efficacy is crucial to bringing an end to this pandemic.




The Virus Cancer Program


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The Virus Cancer Program


Book Description




Challenges and Opportunities for Respiratory Syncytial Virus Vaccines


Book Description

Although respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has been a high priority for vaccine development for over 50 years now, still no vaccine is available and none has yet demonstrated sufficient promise to move to licensure. The success of RSV immune prophylaxis and the availability of ever more powerful tools to study the immune response and pathogenesis of disease, combined with the ability to construct a wide variety of vaccines using different vaccine platforms, give us grounds to believe that an RSV vaccine is within reach. This book brings together in one source what is currently known about the virus: its clinical and epidemiologic features; the host response and pathogenesis of the disease; vaccines, vaccine platforms, and treatment; and animal and tissue culture models of RSV infection. It is designed to organize the critical information relevant to RSV vaccine development, facilitate the assimilation of data, and speed progress toward producing a safe and effective vaccine.










Influenza Virus Vaccines and Immunotherapies


Book Description

Influenza virus infections lead to thousands of deaths worldwide annually and billions of dollars economic burden. Despite continuing advances in our understanding of the immune evasion mechanism, the disease remains one of the foremost threat for human being. Traditional vaccines (attenuated and inactivated) mainly provide protection by inducing virus neutralizing antibodies, targeting ever changing surface antigens: Haemagultinin (HA) and Neuraminidase (NA). Due to genetic shift and immune selection pressure, prevalence of circulating influenza virus subtypes changes every year. Therefore, mismatch between circulating strain and vaccine strain can critically affect the success rate of these conventional flu vaccines, and requires continuous monitoring of circulating influenza virus subtypes and change in the vaccine formulations accordingly. The collective limitations of existing flu vaccines urgently call for the development of a novel universal vaccines that might provide the required protective immunity to a range of influenza virus subtypes. New approaches are being investigated mainly targeting conserved regions of flu proteins. Some of these approaches include universally conserved epitopes of HA, nucleoprotein (NP), capsid protein (M1) and ion channel protein (M2) that induced strong immune responses in animal models. Some attention and progress appears to be focused on vaccines based on the M2 ectodomain (M2e) employing a variety of constructs, adjuvants and delivery systems, including M2e-hepatitis B core antigen, flagellin constructs, and virus-like particles (VLP). Animal studies with these M2e candidate vaccines demonstrated that these vaccine candidates can prevent severe illness and death but not infection, which may pose difficulties in both the evaluation of clinical efficacy and approval by the regulatory authorities. VLP vaccines appear to be promising, but still are mostly limited to animal studies. The discovery and development of new and improved vaccines have been greatly facilitated by the application of new technologies. The use of nucleic acid-based vaccines, to combine the benefits of in-situ expression of antigens with the safety of inactivated and subunit vaccines, has been a key advancement. Upon their discovery more than 20 years ago, nucleic acid vaccines promised to be a safe and effective mean to mimic immunization with a live organism vaccine, particularly for induction of T cell immunity. In addition, the manufacturing of nucleic acid-based vaccines offered the potential to be relatively simple, inexpensive and generic. Reverse Vaccinology and in-silico designing of vaccines are very innovative approaches and being considered as future of vaccines. Furthermore, various immuno-therapeutic agents also being developed to treat and minimize immuno-pathological damage in patients suffering from life threatening complications. For the treatment of such pathological conditions, various novel approaches such as administration of immune suppressive cytokines, blocking co-stimulatory signals or activating co-inhibitory signal of T cell activation, are being tested both in lab and clinics. The Research Topic on influenza virus vaccine and therapeutics will give an insight in to the current status and future scope of these new innovative approaches and technologies. Moreover, these new methods will also serve as a reference tool for the development of future vaccines against several other pathogens.




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