Interview on Self Spreading Vaccines
As a follow up to my previous post here is an Interesting interview on Self Spreading Vaccines with Filippa Lentzos (a senior lecturer in Science and International Security in the Department of War Studies, and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and also Co-Director for the Center for Science and Security at King's College London)
https://www.science.org/content/podcast/setting-permafrost-observatory-and-regulating-transmissible-vaccines
At 14 minute mark
H/t Jim Haslam
Transcript below
https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.acz9954/full/sciencepodcast_220107.pdf
0:14:01.7 SC: Here's an idea. Wild deer can carry malaria. Let's make a malaria vaccine that works in deer and keeps them disease-free, and the vaccine can spread from one deer to the other, so we don't have to find them all and give them shots. Problem solved. Or how about this? There is an invasive lizard in Florida. They're bigger than all the natives, they're taking over, eating all the food, squeezing out the animals that we want to live there. Should we make a virus that spreads only among these invasives, leaving everything else alone? These are not new ideas. Self-spreading vaccines, self-spreading engineered viruses, these were conceived of long ago, but creating them and purposefully releasing them into the world has been deemed too dangerous, too risky by experts, but as Filippa Lentzos and colleagues write in an insight this week in Science, research and funding for efforts like these involving self-spreading vaccines, engineered viruses, it's happening, even today. Hi, Filippa.
0:15:00.5 Filippa Lentzos: Hi, Sarah.
0:15:01.5 SC: These ideas have been around for decades, what prompted you to write about this now?
0:15:06.0 FL: There's a whole bunch of new research going on in this area, and so it seems like while it's been laying dormant for a while, essentially, there's been renewed interest in the last few years.
0:15:18.6 SC: Why are we saying... 'Cause I said it, and you're eventually gonna say it, self- spreading vaccines, self-spreading virus, rather than transmissible or contagious?
0:15:28.8 FL: You can say both. My preference is self-spreading because I think it's easier to understand.
0:15:34.8 SC: So we're talking about two different things here. Self-spreading engineered viruses and self-spreading vaccines. What exactly are those?
0:15:42.8 FL: To me, self-spreading viruses and vaccines are basically lab-modified viruses that are developed to spread between hosts in the environment. So they spread much like diseases do, but instead of spreading diseases, self-spreading vaccines spread immunity. So that's an easy way to think about how they work. You're adding genetic material from a pathogen to a virus, and that added material will then stimulate some kinda antibody creation in the host.
0:16:13.0 SC: This is something we try not to have happen now. We don't want someone with a live virus vaccine, for example, to spread that to someone else, for a number of reasons.
0:16:23.2 FL: That's right.
0:16:24.0 SC: What are some common scenarios for using this technology?
0:16:27.7 FL: The motivation behind some of the research that's going on right now is to use these kinds of vaccines for wildlife management. So essentially, what you would try to do is protect against zoonotic diseases that sometimes leap from animals to people, these spill-over events that we've heard so much about.
0:16:50.2 SC: Yeah. You mentioned this could be done with crops, where the plants are already in the field and you wanna treat them out there with a self-spreading vaccine, for example, but that's not what most of the current research or past research has focused on.
0:17:05.5 FL: The bulk of current research is focused on wildlife and we've got some historical cases of attempts to do that. Back in the late '80s, we had Australian researchers that were developing different ways to try to either sterilize or kill wildlife. Similarly in the '90s, you had Spanish researchers that were trying actually to do the opposite, they were trying to protect native wild rabbits using self-spreading viruses. So as you were saying in the introduction, this idea has been around for a while, but it's kind of come back now in the last five years.
0:17:43.3 SC: What are some of the really big concerns about developing and deploying this kind of intervention for wildlife management or for other reasons?
0:17:51.2 FL: The concern is that lab-modified, self-spreading viruses are genetically too unstable to be used safely and predictably outside of contained facilities, and especially as self-spreading vaccines, but once they're released, it's unlikely that you can remove them from the environment, and the consequences might be irreversible, and there's potential global spread, and so essentially, the concerns were all around continued evolution and unwanted mutations.
0:18:19.2 SC: It's not a technological hurdle here that's preventing these things from happening. All of it is probably feasible but it's really just not something we should do, at least according to the experts that looked at this problem in the '80s, in the '90s.
0:18:33.9 FL: And the regulators have looked at this too, that's right. So it's not the technological issue primarily, I think it is the fact that this will be entering a social context for human vaccines definitely, but there are also concerns around wildlife management using self-spreading vaccines.
0:18:52.3 SC: Is it a practical intervention to try to vaccinate wildlife against something that may jump to people because we don't know which virus is gonna jump to people?
0:19:03.1 FL: Basically, the arguments behind for wildlife immunization with self-spreading vaccines don't really hold up to scrutiny because the vast majority of viral species simply haven't been identified by science, so we don't know what we're up against. That's one of the arguments that doesn't hold up. Another is that viruses are really very dynamic. There's lots of mutation, there's lots of evolution going on. So of the viruses that we do know about, how are you going to prioritize the particular spill-over risk that you're gonna focus on? What particular genetic event is it that's gonna happen, in which particular wildlife species is it, at what locations? They're all these unknowns. And the finalizing points, it's just the plain logistics of this, how in practice can you sustain and monitor the immune response to the vaccine in wildlife populations? How are you gonna know if it works or not?
0:20:01.6 SC: What approaches are people trying or should they be trying instead?
0:20:04.9 FL: Well, I think what most virologists would advocate for instead of self-spreading vaccines is just for surveillance at the human/animal interface, especially in hotspots, and once you identify a potential spillover, you need quick intervention, rather than going into the wildlife itself and trying to prevent a spillover. So to some extent, it seems not a very logical argument to be making but the point is it is being made and it's being made with considerable funding. There are heavyweight funders funding this research from the NIH, the EU Horizon's Project, and DARPA. It's still a very small community, but over the last five years, they've still had over a dozen scientific publications on this, and it's got a fair bit of coverage in popular science and in media. And so the idea is seeded, it's being put out there but you're not seeing the discussion within the scientific community about, what are the anticipated benefits of this, are they realistic? What are the potential harms, what are the potential risks? How do we weigh those?
0:21:21.5 SC: Yeah, it does seem like that discussion was had, people kind of agreed, and then it was forgotten about because it's been so long, and it's like zombie science, it's just gonna keep showing up, people are gonna keep proposing it, and testing it out, and, do we need to have these discussions again with virologists, with epidemiologists, with wildlife management?
0:21:40.7 FL: I think the answer really is to have a more open debate about whether we should be doing this kind of research at all. This is clearly a global concern, so we need to have a global governance effort. That means at the international level, we need to update existing regulations around this to reflect contemporary societal values, and these will have shifted in light of the COVID experience, for sure. We also need national governments to clarify and if necessary, update any relevant legislation and guidance they have in this area, and I think we need to ask more of the researchers and their institutions, and the funders who are working on these approaches to actively articulate credible regulatory paths that they believe the safety and efficacy of self-spreading vaccines can be established.
0:22:36.0 SC: This seems especially important if the research is being done by one country with the aim of applying it in another country for a problem that isn't local to the researchers.
0:22:48.2 FL: Yes, we do see that happening. We do see, for example, funders in the United States funding research going ahead in Africa, for instance, saying, "Oh, this is gonna be of huge benefit to them," but it is also at a risk to them. And so there are questions around outsourcing risks, there are questions about for whose benefit is this, really? And I think that discussion needs to be brought more to the fore and more to the communal level and not be kept in these very specialized niches or groups.
0:23:26.2 SC: What are some of the safeguards that have been proposed or that people discuss as a possibility for something that's self-spreading?
0:23:34.7 FL: What the researchers are currently claiming is that there are approaches that exist that will suppress viral evolution so that these viruses that you release won't mutate in the environment. They also say that the viruses and the vaccines can be fine-tuned so that they only have pre-determined lifetimes. Now, none of that is proved.
0:23:57.2 SC: Oh, I was gonna say, how does that hold up? [chuckle]
0:24:00.3 FL: Yeah, not very well, like these are claims that are being made, but they've not been proved, they've not been evidenced, and I think there would be a lot of suppressed faces if they could evidence the fact that evolution doesn't continue with viruses. We're talking in the middle of an Omicron wave, we are, I think all of us, very conscious that viruses evolve in the wild.
0:24:24.6 SC: In my experience on social media, some of the wilder things I've seen are people saying, "Oh, well, the covid vaccines, the coronavirus vaccines are spreading person to person." Obviously, that's not true, but it's not something we should avoid talking about.
0:24:39.6 FL: No, I think that's right. I mean, I think there would be an incredible backlash against any suggestion that we would introduce self-spreading vaccines for humans, and we see that particularly with the anti-vaxxers movement, for instance, and what was interesting before this article came out in Science. I wrote with some of my co-authors another smaller piece for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, where our title, which was "Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease, what could possibly go wrong?" Attracted an incredible amount of clicks and attention, and that was primarily from the anti-vaxxer community. They thought, from the headline, that this could be something to back up their arguments, but of course, if you read through the article, that's not at all what it was.
0:25:32.0 SC: I have to admit that when I first read Self-spreading Vaccine, I was like,
maybe," but as soon as I read your piece, I was like, "Oh no, we do not wanna give people vaccines that don't want them because they could have a reaction, they can have an immune-compromise situation, there are so many reasons.
0:25:48.4 FL: That's right, there are more vulnerable communities out there, of course, but what is interesting, it is, it does seem like an inherently attractive idea especially when you think about it in terms of not humans, but wildlife. Could we just have let a virus loose on bats that then would have ensured the coronavirus didn't spill over into the human population? It seems a very attractive idea at first glance.
0:26:15.5 SC: But the practicalities and the dangers are really big questions.
0:26:20.9 FL: Yes. I mean there are safety aspects to this, there are ethical aspects to this, there are also security aspects to this. So it needs and warrants a much deeper discussion, and the steps that we're seeing currently, where researchers are suggesting this is a possibility right now, I think are worrying, when we haven't had that discussion.
0:26:42.4 SC: Alright, thanks, Filippa.
0:26:44.0 FL: Thanks, Sarah, it's been good to speak to you.
0:26:45.8 SC: Filippa Lentzos is a senior lecturer in Science and International Security in the Department of War Studies, and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and also Co-Director for the Center for Science and Security at King's College London. You can find a link to the inside article we discussed at science.org/podcast.
0:27:06.6 SC: And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us at sciencepodcast@aaas.org. You can listen to the show on the Science website at science.org/podcast. You could subscribe there or anywhere you get your podcast. The show was edited and produced by Sarah Crespi, with production help from Podigy, Megan Cantwell, and Joel Goldberg. Transcripts are by Scribie, Jeffrey Cook composed the music. On behalf of Science Magazine, and its publisher, AAAS, thanks for joining us.