Show Notes
This episode begins by asking the question, "Why is it that we don't have an HIV vaccine after 40 years, but we do have a COVID-19 vaccine after one year?" Dr. Leor Weinberger explains that the answer to this question is primarily due to the existence (or lack thereof) of natural convalescents and whether the immune system is able to beat the virus. Dr. Weinberger further explains that there have only been two "recovered" people who had HIV. These two recoveries happened through bone marrow transplants, which themselves have 50 percent survival rates. Next, Dr. Weinberger gives a history of HIV vaccine development. Then, we drill down into the specifics of why HIV has been so challenging to develop a vaccine for. Dr. Weinberger explains the role of mutation as a primary source of this difficulty, coupled with the fact that HIV inserts itself into your genome and is able to persist in the body for decades, leading to no natural convalescents.
To conclude, we hear Dr. Weinberger's thoughts on COVID-19 vaccine specifics such as how long COVID-19 may stay with us, if we may have to get additional vaccines, and how the persistence of antibody levels factors into these considerations. We end with a discussion on the mechanisms of the COVID-19 vaccines that have been developed. For those interested, a great resource for further reading on the bioinformatics of COVID-19 vaccine mRNA can be found at https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/
More from The Bioinformatics and Beyond Podcast
Dr. Justin Siegel begins this episode by explaining what enzymes are, how they have evolved, and why Dr. Siegel is motivated to try to engineer enzymes to perform functions tailored to help humanity instead of to perform functions based on how they evolved in nature. He explains the primary goal of the work discussed and relating enzyme sequence to function. Dr. Siegel also explains how his work was the first of its kind by scaling up enzyme design to hundreds of mutants instead of dozens.
Dr. Justin Siegel explains the past, present, and future of wet lab work and wet lab automation. We start by hearing a description of what it is like to work in a wet lab, covering the contrast between the excitement of seeing life changing results and the countless hours of monotony that is often involved to produce these results.
Dr. Afshin Beheshti begins this episode by explaining what microRNAs are and why they are emerging as an important area of biological research. He then explains how microRNAs relate to viruses, which is a recently developing area of research in this already young field of study. Dr. Beheshti then tells the story of how he started to discover that microRNAs could be a driver of COVID-19 infections.
This episode concludes the podcast’s series of episodes focused on space biology and space omics. NASA scientist Dr. Afshin Beheshti discusses the many high level hazards and corresponding molecular features of spaceflight throughout this episode. For instance, we begin with a discussion of the hazards of radiation and microgravity. Dr. Beheshti spends time explaining a high level view of what each hazard is, why it is a concern for spaceflight, and educates us on many useful and interesting pieces of information for each hazard. Further hazards discussed include confinement and isolation, hostile and closed environment, and distance from Earth.
This episode discusses Dr. Tejaswini Mishra’s recent publication in Nature Biomedical Engineering: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00640-6 Dr. Mishra begins the episode by explaining the origin story of this work and how the idea for this paper came to be. She then explains how this study enrolled thousands of participants and used the participants’ smartwatch or wearable device data to detect COVID-19 infections. After explaining how this study began, Dr. Mishra discusses how she and her team came up with two main algorithms for detecting COVID-19 infections from wearables data. Dr. Mishra also discusses the many variables that could be monitored with wearables in addition to standard measures used for predicting illnesses like heart rate. Finally, we hear about the main results of this study including the successful detection of several active COVID-19 infections in study participants. We also hear a comparison of this work against the COVID-19 wearables study featured previously on the podcast. We end by hearing Dr. Mishra’s thoughts on the future of wearables for detecting infectious diseases and for improving human health in general.