Vaccines protect health and promote scientific advancement

The health area is a striking example of disruptive technologies that, throughout history, have contributed to solving problems that negatively impact our lives.

The formulation of new drugs, increasingly accurate in treatments and with fewer side effects, has improved the quality of life for centuries. In the same way, new technologies for diagnostic medicine and the performance of more precise and less invasive surgical procedures are highlighted.   The use of artificial intelligence is another field to be highlighted.

In preventive medicine, the great disruptive feat was the invention (or discovery) of vaccines. Since the first register, the vaccine against smallpox produced by Edward Jenner (century XVIII), humanity keeps trying to eradicate serious illnesses, such as polio and meningitis.

Now, scientists are looking for new means of producing vaccines that can protect us against any variants of the viruses currently known, especially the most transmissible and with the greatest potential for mutation.

The focus of this new development front for immunizers is the coronavirus, responsible for the covid-19 pandemic. If, on the one hand, we obtained effective and safe vaccines against the new virus, on the other hand, there was a “counterattack” through variants that emerged very fast, such as Omicron.

That is, the speed of transmission of the coronavirus generated variants with greater transmission potential and the challenge to be achieved is to overcome it in this race by producing effective and safe vaccines against the variants that do not yet exist.

So, the paradigm to be overcome is the inversion of the typical logic of immunizers that we have at our disposal. One example is the common flu protection line, which annually offers an updated dose, not reinforcement, with protection against new variants of the Influenza virus.

Here, in the current case of covid-19, scientific and technological ambition has put experts on course to invent a vaccine that will target the entire family of coronaviruses, including merbecoviruses, which cause MERS, embecoviruses, responsible for common colds, and the subgenus sarbecovirus, which gave rise to covid and the SARS virus.

And this concern for the advancement of technology and science – the basis for disruptive advances – is close to achieving the desired results against sarbecoviruses, making it possible to combat its entire lineage.

The journal Science published an article showing the positive results for protection in monkeys and mice against various strains of sarbecovirus. Caltech team’s strategy (  Institute of Science and Engineering of California  ) is to train the immune system to attack targets that many sarbecoviruses have in common, preparing the body’s defenses for all variants.

That is, scientists have not conformed to the excellent results achieved with the current immunizations against covid and are advancing to deliver more! The vocation to push the boundaries of knowledge and break barriers has been and will continue to be the great engine for disruptive advances.

Caring for collective problems and working to overcome them is the main characteristic of humanity that has provided us with better days.