How are vaccines made?

Question: How are vaccines made?
- Keywords:
  vaccine
Asked by anon-288205 on 17 Mar 2021.
- Jess Buddle answered on 17 Mar 2021:
  
  Hey great question!!
  
  Vaccines are thought up /researched in the lab – this can take years but often if the knowledge is there it doesnt take too long to design a new vaccine. Lots of preclinical work goes in to testing it to see if it is a viable candidate.
  
  When it gets to human trials there are 3 phases, each one testing bigger groups of people for both safety and to make sure it works at preventing disease. Then if all is ok they can be made in bulk and used for the public!
- Callum Thomas answered on 17 Mar 2021:
  
  Hi Chloe. It depends, there are a few different strategies. Some vaccines use a killed or weakened virus or bacteria, so that the body can still react to it without getting sick. Obviously the important part here is to do lots of tests to work out how best to kill or inactivate the vaccine and make sure it is properly killed or inactivated so that we don’t make people sick by accident. Other vaccines use only the part on the outside of the virus or bacteria that the body recognises. Again this means the body can recognise the virus or bacteria and start working to fight it off without actually getting sick. So the important part here is to work out what parts of the virus or bacteria the body recognises and how we can produce them. Once scientists have decided on the strategy they want to use, before the vaccines can be given to anyone they also have to do lots of tests to see how well they work on people and if they are safe.
- Alba Park de la Torriente answered on 23 Mar 2021:
  
  I think Callum summarised very well how most of the vaccines are made. As he said, the purpose of vaccines is that our bodies learn hoy to react when they encounter a bacterium or virus, so that they can fight it and protect us. So presenting a weak version of the bacterium (one that is alive and can interact with our cells, but is incapable of cause too much damage) to our bodies is like a training session. If our bodies do get in contact with the real bacterium (the one that is able to get us ill) then our bodies are ready to attack it because they have previously been trained for it.
  
  There are these new types of vaccines that use DNA or RNA. Some of the vaccines for COVID19 are this type. They give the information (RNA) to our cells so that they can produce only one tiny part of the virus. This part is then recognised as something that is from a virus and the immune cells start the training to learn how to get rid of anything that has this structure.

Question: How are vaccines made?

Comments