Coronavirus and vaccination 2020

Here are questions students of the 3BIbDF classes had after the reading of the article "Coronavirus vaccination", 576 | Nature | Vol 580 | 30 April 2020.

What is a vaccine?

A vaccine is a harmless antigen that makes the immunitary immune system of an individual react, so that it is trained against a given pathogen.

Vaccines can be based on whole modified viruses or of virus parts.

Nice start... welcome to the immunological world! The definition is not sufficient. Several antigens can be included in a vaccine... So, you'll have to better define the term and of course, also define what is an antigen.--Pierre.brawand (discussion) 18 mai 2020 à 22:04 (CEST)

Why are there less teams of searchers trying to developp virus vaccines?

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How do viruses infect us?

Viruses are a non-living infectious agent. They enter our body, in the case of the COVID-19 it is through mucus such as saliva, attach onto a cell in our body thanks to the ACE2 receptors and enter the cell. When the have entered the cell, they use the cell’s ressources to create more viruses that are released in the body. --IrisH (discussion) 19 mai 2020 à 08:54 (CEST)

How do vaccines work?

When we get vaccinated, we are exposed a non infectious or a part of the virus to trigger an immune response in our body to the particular disease. The virus will be in a form that prevents it from making the patient sick, but at the same time, enough for our bodies to produce antibodies, hence developing immunity. --IrisH (discussion) 19 mai 2020 à 08:44 (CEST)

How does the vaccine not actually make us sick?

The vaccine contains either an inactivated or weakened form of the virus. If it is a weakened form of the virus, it will have mutations that make it less infectious. If it is inactive, then it is not infectious. For this particular form of vaccine, we need to inject more to make sure we trigger an immune response. --IrisH (discussion) 19 mai 2020 à 09:11 (CEST)

What are the different tested forms of the virus used in vaccines?

As we now know, the virus in a vaccine is not the actual virus we would get infected by if we got infected “naturally”. The vaccine can contain different parts of the virus, or different forms of the virus to trigger an immune response. --IrisH (discussion) 19 mai 2020 à 09:11 (CEST)

Only the virus’s RNA and DNA

If the vaccine contains only the nucleic acid of the virus (and sometimes the gene that generates the spike protein), then our body will create the virus’s RNA for instance. It will create an immune response, our body will create antibodies particularly for this virus. --IrisH (discussion) 19 mai 2020 à 09:17 (CEST)

Injecting the virus but weakened

When we inject the weakened virus into our body, it can have two forms: either it has the ability to replicate or not. If it has the ability to replicate then it is advantageous because it triggers a strong immune response and it is safe. If it does not have the ability to replicate, it will probably have to be followed by other injections to make sure we develop immunity. The weakened non-able to replicate virus vaccine is not used yet but is an interesting path due to its conclusive history. --IrisH (discussion) 19 mai 2020 à 09:24 (CEST)

Only some proteins of the virus

In this category of vaccines there are also two types of virus forms, either the protein spikes, that act as receptors, or an empty virus. The vaccine containing the protein spikes might need multiple doses to trigger an immune response. The empty virus vaccine is not commonly used because it is hard to create. It is triggering an immune response by making our body react to the outside part of the virus. In this scenario, the virus is only formed of its outer coat but no genetic material. --IrisH (discussion) 19 mai 2020 à 09:33 (CEST)

What about the current Coronavirus?

Many teams are looking for a vaccine in all of the different vaccine methods mentioned. The most used are the protein based vaccine and the viral vector vaccine. They are in the testing stages either on animals or already in the human testing stage. --IrisH (discussion) 19 mai 2020 à 09:41 (CEST)

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