Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hello, today I'm going to talk
about vaccine manufacturing.
My name is Donald Gerson
and I have a long history
in vaccine manufacturing.
I received a PhD in biophysics from
McGill University a long time ago.
I've spent approximately the
last 30 years making most
of the commercial vaccines
that are available today
and was involved in
making the very first
of all three major
conjugate vaccines that
are currently available worldwide.
So today we're going to talk
about how you make vaccines,
and why to make vaccines,
and what's involved.
I'm going to focus on
the kinds of things
that you can't so
easily read in a book.
So some of the, I hope,
wisdom behind this,
rather than just some
technical details
that you could read elsewhere.
0:51
So first of all, there are an
awful lot of benefits to vaccines,
but they came initially
as scientific discovery.
So in order to benefit humanity
from a scientific discovery,
you have to convert that
discovery into widely
used products or services.
And that's just as
true for vaccines as it
is for cellular phones, or
any other electronic device,
or information technology process.
There's a huge effort required
to go from the initial scientific
discovery to something
that's useful and makes
a difference to people's lives.
Now, in the particular
issue of making vaccines,
there are only several hundred
serious pathogens for humans.
Each one has a number
of antigens which
are usually protein
molecules, but not always,
that generate an immune response.
A very small number of those
antigens, in the pathogens,
provide protective immunity.
And so part of the
scientific discovery
is to find which ones are protective
and how to administer them,
so that a person generates a
lifelong protective response.
And in reality, in spite of there
being hundreds of pathogens,
really only a handful, 20
nominally, have been converted
into widely used vaccines.
And there's both scientific
problems and manufacturing problems
that have limited this conversion
of scientific knowledge
into useful products.
So today, here, we're
going to talk about what's
involved in making
widely used vaccines,
starting with the
scientific discovery.
