Synthetic vaccine

A synthetic vaccine is a vaccine consisting mainly of synthetic peptides, carbohydrates, or antigens. They are usually considered to be safer than vaccines from bacterial cultures. Creating vaccines synthetically has the ability to increase the speed of production. This is especially important in the event of a pandemic.

History

The world's first synthetic vaccine was created in 1982 from diphtheria toxin by Louis Chedid (scientist) from the Pasteur Institute and Michael Sela from the Weizmann Institute.

In 1986, Manuel Elkin Patarroyo created the SPf66, the first version of a synthetic vaccine for Malaria.

During the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, vaccines only became available in large quantities after the peak of human infections. This was a learning experience for vaccination companies. Novartis Vaccine and Diagnostics, among other companies, developed a synthetic approach that very rapidly generates vaccine viruses from sequence data in order to be able to administer vaccinations early in the pandemic outbreak. Philip Dormatizer, the leader of viral vaccine research at Novartis, says they have "developed a way of chemically synthesizing virus genomes and growing them in tissue culture cells" (Young, 2013).

References and links

• Article on synthetic Hib vaccine
• CRISP Thesaurus entry on Synthetic Vaccines
• Young, S. (2013, May 14). Synthetic Biology Could Speed Flu Vaccine Production. MIT Technology Review.
• Web Health Centre: History of Vaccines