Vaccination research on covid-19

  Scripps Research: Vaccination research on covid-19

Here at scripps research  doctors are working on three different tracks.Doctors are focusing on drugs that can use be used to treat the infection and we're using the enormous resources of Scripps and it's deep expertise in drug screening and drug development to make compounds that would help treat an established infection. We're using our knowledge of the virus to develop antibodies and other kinds of biologics that health care workers could use to protect from an infection. These would last for 40 days after a single administration. And, then we're developing vaccine. And, our goal here is to be able to identify which parts of the virus are most important for the immune system to target and to develop vaccines that focus on those regions of the virus. Our first goal in the vaccine field is to understand what the best way to target the virus is. So, on the surface of the virus is a protein called the S-protein or the spike protein. It is the only piece of the virus that your immune system sees and we want to make sure that your immune system focuses on those parts of that protein that are most useful and least likely to be harmful in a vaccine formulation.

 Our second problem is with biologics. And, here we know how to make good antibodies and good biologics but we need to ensure that they live for a good amount of time in your body and the reason that's important is we need to have something that you can inject once and it would protect a doctor or healthcare worker from infection and not require repeated injections. The key viral steps in the life cycle that we're targeting are number one the entry process, the manner in which the virus latches onto the cell. Number two, we are targeting two proteases that are essential for the virus to make the proteins it needs to replicate and we are then also targeting structures -- RNA structures -- that the virus forms and needs to replicate. 

So, if you can blockade any of those steps you can stop the virus from replicating. An enormous spirit of collaboration and hard work and just goodwill across the campus and actually across science in general internationally there are about a hundred people now work in the scripps research on the corona virus this ranges from individuals who are biologists experts in corona virology to people who work on the development of small molecules to individuals in our veterinary staff, to our histologists, our cores. There's five hundred labs, five hundred groups of across the world that are roughly doing the same thing and the point is now we're sharing data and working together and pushing this thing as fast and as hard as we possibly can What truly keeps me up at night is I'm gonna lose somebody I know. I also worry about the unnecessary deaths that might occur if we don't take proper measures. The concern of course is that if twomany of us get the virus then our ability to treat those people will be diminished and as consequence some people who should live may not.