Vaccines And AI

We’re familiar with the role of vaccines in preventing diseases like measles and polio. But there’s a lot more to it than that, especially these days, as vaccines are at a crossroads. High-tech systems help us to advance vaccine discovery and development and improve how vaccines work.

There is the obvious example of developing mRNA vaccines for Covid, but there are other kinds of groundbreaking vaccine work . New science is emerging based on artificial intelligence capabilities .

Dr. Ofer Levy is the Director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.

“Vaccines are really for protection,” he said in a recent TED talk focused on vaccine research, “but there are challenges to realize the full benefit of immunization. You can design the best vaccine in the world. If people don’t want to take it, it’s not going to help them. So, vaccine attitudes are an important topic. Some vaccines require multiple doses to fully protect. That’s a challenge. And of course, infections are most severe in the very young and in elders, when the immune system is relatively weaker, and those are the populations, it’s more challenging to protect as well.” Levy described the first vaccine developed by Jenner in 1796 and detailed how vaccines just over the last 20 years, in the U.S. alone, pediatric vaccines have prevented over 300 million illnesses, 32 million hospitalizations and nearly 750,000 deaths.

In discussing the best ways to introduce new vaccines, Levy noted that the response of each patient group is also unique.

“One size does not fit all,” he said.

Bio-banks, Adjuvant and Endotypes

As I listened to Levy‘s talk, I found myself wondering about some of the terms. He referenced a human bio-bank, which is essentially a repository for specimens (white blood cells) that can be used in vaccine research. He mentioned adjuvants, which are small molecules that can be added to a vaccine to boost an immune response to the antigen (antibody generating substance).

And he mentioned endotypes, which are a molecular sub-type of a health condition that can be useful in this research to determine how best to introduce vaccine elements to the body. There are also phenotypes, or signs and symptoms that manifest differently in different individuals. Scientist sometimes define the endotype as the “mechanistic pathway” leading to the condition or phenotype.

What Does the Precision Vaccine Program Do?

Levy also described the Precision Vaccine Program this way:

“It’s a multi-disciplinary academic program that uses innovative approaches to discover and develop precision vaccines tailored to vulnerable populations,” he said. “These approaches include targeted clinical trials in diverse populations, diverse by age, ethnicity, race and geography, and it also includes using systems biology technologies that can measure the entire inventory of cells and molecules in the body before and after a vaccine is given, because, in reality, most vaccines were discovered by trial and error, not by rational design. So, using these cutting-edge technologies, we can now characterize the molecular response to a vaccine, and correlate to something we care about clinically like safety as well as immunogenicity, the ability of the vaccine to induce a protective antibody level.”

He mentioned development of a systems that can model age-specific vaccine responses outside the body (in cell culture) named MEMPHIS which can be used to accelerate and de-risk vaccine development tailored to vulnerable populations. Leveraging big data approaches in clinical trials (in vivo) and in cell culture systems (in vitro) coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning is defining actionable biomarkers to advance development of vaccines that can do more, in line with the recent FDA Modernization Act 2.0. “Could we create vaccines that require fewer doses and that might also protect against a broader range of microbial variants?” Levy asked. “Can we create vaccines that redirect immune development away from immune diseases such as asthma and allergy?”

Opioid Prevention

Scientists are also using vaccine technology to take aim at an American public health emergency: the opioid epidemic.. It is estimated that more than one million Americans have died of fentanyl overdoses since 2020. Levy explained that there is now an “opioid vaccine” under development that will work on people with the biggest chance of developing an opioid addiction.

“The vaccine would be given to people who are at higher-than-average risk of an opioid overdose,” he explained. “It would induce antibodies against fentanyl in their blood, and if they were subsequently exposed to fentanyl, the antibodies would bind it and prevent it from penetrating into the brain, where it causes suppression of respiration and death.”

All of this is very relevant to how we’re pursuing healthcare today. It’s not just a question of making sure that we keep infections such as measles and polio at bay. There’s cutting-edge research on new vaccines that cover a lot more ground in terms of promoting longevity and quality of life .

Let’s see how this kind of work continues through this year as AI keeps developing.