Agility in adversity: Vaccines on Demand

ABSTRACT

Is the US ready for a biological attack using Ebola virus or Anthrax? Will vaccine developers be able to produce a Zika virus vaccine, before the epidemic spreads around the world? A recent report by The Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense argues that the US is not ready for these challenges, however, technologies and capabilities that could address these deficiencies are within reach. Vaccine technologies have advanced and readiness has improved in recent years, due to advances in sequencing technology and computational power making the ‘vaccines on demand’ concept a reality. Building a robust strategy to design effective biodefense vaccines from genome sequences harvested by real-time biosurveillance will benefit from technologies that are being brought to bear on the cancer cure ‘moonshot’. When combined with flexible vaccine production platforms, vaccines on demand will relegate expensive and, in some cases, insufficiently effective vaccine stockpiles to the dust heap of history.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccine
• biodefense
• Zika virus
• smallpox
• anthrax
• influenza
• avian influenza
• pandemic
• bioterror
• cancer vaccine
• computational vaccinology
• immunoinformatics
• genome
• personalized vaccine
• FDA
• IND
• BLA
• platform
• T cell
• T-cell assay
• iVAX system
• genome-to-vaccine
• epitope-driven vaccine

Declaration of Interest

A De Groot and W Martin are founders and majority owners of EpiVax, Inc. a biotechnology company that provides access to immunoinformatics tools and designs vaccines for commercial clients. L Moise is an employee and holds options at EpiVax, Inc. D Olive is Principal of Catalyst Partners and the Moderator of the Washington Homeland Security Roundtable. These authors acknowledge that there is a potential conflict of interest inherent in the publication of this manuscript, and asserts that they made an effort to reduce or eliminate that conflict where possible. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.