SynBio9: SynBio and Vaccines (v1.0)

Synthetic virology is a branch of virology engaged in the study and engineering of synthetic man-made viruses. It is a multidisciplinary research field at the intersection of virology, synthetic biology, computational biology, and DNA nanotechnology, from which it borrows and integrates its concepts and methodologies. There is a wide range of applications for synthetic viral technology such as medical treatments, investigative tools, and reviving organisms. Both RNA and DNA viruses can be made using existing methods. The first man-made infectious viruses generated without any natural template were of the polio virus and the φX174 bacteriophage. With synthetic live viruses, it is not whole viruses that are synthesized but rather their genome at first, both in the case of DNA and RNA viruses. Read the paleontology essay on viruses for more info on viruses. 

This technology is now being used to investigate novel vaccine strategies. The ability to synthesize viruses has far-reaching consequences, since viruses can no longer be regarded as extinct, as long as the information of their genome sequence is known, and permissive cells are available. As of March 2020, the full-length genome sequences of 9,240 different viruses, including the smallpox virus, are publicly available in an online database maintained by the National Institute of Health.

When the covid genetic code was first made available around Jan 10th by China, it took 3 weeks for needed genetic material to arrive, and it was synthesized very rapidly by a lab in a week after that. Other labs across the world did the same. The speed and relative ease of achieving this feat helped accelerate the creation of a vaccine and treatments. 

We have now entered into the new world of digital vaccines. The essence of vaccination consists of exposing the human body to a surrogate of a pathogenic microorganism so that the human immune system can learn how to recognize and fight the foreign invader. Analog vaccines require isolation of the pathogen or the generation of a recombinant cell line to produce the protein antigen through fermentation and purification. This is a complex and long process where scale-up of new manufacturing methods can take years. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has generated a renaissance in vaccinology, with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines delivering a “digital code” of the viral antigen with no need to purify proteins or inactivate pathogens. Digital vaccines only require genetic information encoding the antigen and not the protein antigen itself. Such genetic information can be shared via the internet and used by multiple laboratories and production facilities around the world. In the case of mRNA-encoded vaccines, the same manufacturing process and facility can be used for multiple vaccines. Digital vaccines enable much faster vaccine development. Traditional analog vaccines can take 10 to 15 years from discovery to clinical use. Parallel clinical development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, with overlap of phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials, resulted in emergency use authorization by the FDA within 10 months, without compromising safety and efficacy.

8% of our DNA is as a result of past viral infections. Many of these virus-genes were passed down from our ancestors. They are sometime referred to as viral fossils. Some of these fossils may help us defend against later viruses and aid our immune system. Studying viral fossils may help us broaden our understanding of viruses and immune systems. Synthetic viruses have also been researched as potential gene therapy tools.