There are currently 25 vaccines to fight COVID-19 in clinical evaluation, another 139 vaccines in a pre-clinical stage, and many more being researched.
But many of those vaccines, if they are at all successful, might not produce an immune response in portions of the population. That’s because some people’s bodies will react differently to the materials in the vaccine that are supposed to stimulate virus-fighting T cells.
And so just figuring out how much coverage a vaccine has, meaning, how many people it will stimulate to mount an immune response, is a big part of the vaccine puzzle.
With that challenge in mind, scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Monday unveiled a machine learning approach that can predict the probability that a particular vaccine design will reach a certain proportion of the population. That doesn’t mean they can guarantee its effectiveness, but the scientists’ work can aid in knowing up-front whether a given vaccine will have large gaps in who it can help.
The good news is, the MIT scholars have used their approach to design a novel COVID-19 vaccine on the computer that has far better coverage than many of the designs that have been published in the literature this year. They’re now testing the design in animals.
The bad news is, there could very well be large gaps in coverage of some of the existing vaccines already being explored by companies and labs, according to one of the authors of the report, David K. Gifford, who is with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
“While they may protect more than 50% of the population, certain individuals and older individuals may not be protected,” Gifford told ZDNet in an email, when asked about vaccines currently under trial and in development.
The long path to a vaccine
Vaccines in development were not the direct subject of the work. Most of those vaccines are closed designs; no one knows exactly how they are composed. Instead, Gifford and colleagues designed vaccines from scratch, and then analyzed how effective they are, and extrapolated the findings to a group of vaccines whose composition is known.
Based on that, one can infer there might be problems with vaccines whose exact composition is not known.
It must be borne in mind that any in silico vaccine design such as the kind discussed here is only the beginning of a process that can take years to go through in vivo testing, in animals and then in humans, to establish both safety (non-toxicity), and efficacy, meaning that it actually confers a significant immune response.
But the work shows the ability of large computer models to dramatically speed up the initial work of searching through many, many possible combinations within a universe of possible ingredients, a search that can itself take years at the front end of a drug development pipeline.
This is the latest in large-scale, in-silico efforts against pathogens seen this year from MIT. Back in March, ZDNet reported on how MIT scientists used large-scale machine learning to search many combinations of compounds to come up with a novel antibiotic for a germ nothing else could kill.
Image Credit: Amanda Scott/Envato
Thanks to Heinz V. Hoenen. Follow him on twitter: @HeinzVHoenen

News This Week
Platelet-Rich Plasma Applications for Achilles Tendon Repair: A Bridge between Biology and Surgery
Frank Boehm (Nanoapps Medical Inc. Founder) has contributed to 'Platelet-Rich Plasma Applications for Achilles Tendon Repair: A Bridge between Biology and Surgery', published by International Journal of Molecular Sciences/ MDP. Abstract: Achilles tendon ruptures [...]
SARS_CoV_2 Can Infect Neurons and Damage Brain Tissue
Using both mouse and human brain tissue, researchers at Yale School of Medicine have discovered that SARS-CoV-2 can directly infect the central nervous system and have begun to unravel some of the virus’s effects on [...]
MIT algorithm discovers antibiotic that can fight drug-resistant diseases
A deep learning algorithm developed at MIT has discovered new antibiotics that can treat drug-resistant diseases by killing 35 powerful bacteria. The pathogens that the halicin antibiotic has targetted include Acinetobacter baumannii, which was nicknamed [...]
Article: ‘Digital Rights in the Age of Super Intelligence’ by Eva Kaili
In our transforming world, digital technology has the critical mass to push our frontiers and release unlimited potential. As the wave of digital transformation soars high, improving our lives, industries and economies, we must not [...]
Scientists Discover a Way to Control the Immune System’s “Natural Killer” Cells With “Invisible” Stem Cells
UC San Francisco scientists have discovered a new way to control the immune system’s “natural killer” (NK) cells, a finding with implications for novel cell therapies and tissue implants that can evade immune rejection. The [...]
Simulations Reveal Nature’s Design For Error Correction During DNA Replication
A team led by scientists at Georgia State University simulates the precise transition between the processes of DNA synthesis and proofreading DNA replication is one of the most important processes in biology, responsible for ensuring [...]
‘Long Covid’ is anything but a mild illness
With the excitement of the Covid vaccine’s arrival, it may be easy to forget and ignore those of us with “long Covid”, who are struggling to reclaim our previous, pre-viral lives and continue to live [...]
Could COVID-19 have wiped out the Neandertals?
Everybody loves Neandertals, those big-brained brutes we supposedly outcompeted and ultimately replaced using our sharp tongues and quick, delicate minds. But did we really, though? Is it mathematically possible that we could yet be them, [...]
Inside Oxford’s coronavirus vaccine development
From a small discovery to producing at scale, photojournalist David Levene documents the groundbreaking work of the scientists of Oxford University during the development of a vaccine which is now poised for approval by medicines regulators. [...]
From molecule to medicine via machine learning
t typically takes many years of experiments to develop a new medicine. Although vaccines to protect against disease from the novel coronavirus are starting to reach clinics around the world, patients and doctors will still [...]
First Optical Tweezers Capable of Trapping Nanoparticles
Optical tweezers are a rapidly growing technology, and have opened up a wide variety of research applications in recent years. The devices operate by trapping particles at the focal points of tightly focused laser beams, [...]
Brain Implants Enable Man to Simultaneously Control Two Prosthetic Limbs with ‘Thoughts’
In what is believed to be a medical first, researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM) and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) have enabled a quadriplegic man to control a pair of prosthetic [...]
How to use antibodies to control chemical reactions
Antibodies are remarkable biomarkers: they are the cues that provide us with indications about many diseases and how our immune system counter them. Now a group of scientists from the University of Rome, Tor Vergata [...]
How COVID-19 Reaches the Brain
Using post-mortem tissue samples, a team of researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have studied the mechanisms by which the novel coronavirus can reach the brains of patients with COVID-19, and how the immune system [...]
Medicine-carriers made from human cells can cure lung infections
Scientists used human white blood cell membranes to carry two drugs, an antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory, directly to infected lungs in mice. The nano-sized drug delivery method developed at Washington State University successfully treated both [...]
Quantum nanodiamonds may help detect disease earlier
The quantum sensing abilities of nanodiamonds can be used to improve the sensitivity of paper-based diagnostic tests, potentially allowing for earlier detection of diseases such as HIV, according to a study led by UCL researchers [...]