Question

I want 3 problems or challenges for vaccine development and explain it

Answer 1

The problems or challenges faced during vaccine developments are:

1. Consideration of the various strains of viruses. While developing a vaccine always choose the most conserved sequences among the pathogens. The viruses tend to have many strains which have mutations in various regions of different structural and non-structural viral proteins. This is the main problem while developing a vaccine against a virus or any pathogen as the pathogen tends to undergo various mutations in order to increase its virulence. Hence the first step in order to solve this problem is the thorough sequencing of all the strains of viruses present and then finding the most conserved sequences among these strains and hence selecting that region as the potential vaccine candidate.

2. Another challenge is that the vaccine that is developed shouldnt at any cost undergo any mutation and get back or revert back its pathogenic properties that are harmful for the hosts. If this happens then it is like injecting the disease directly into the hosts. To solve this problem the vaccine production and also transport should be under strict protocols. That is the vaccine production and quality must be checked for all the batches of vaccines produced and also the vaccines must be stored at designated temperatures so that the pathogen wont be active enough to cause a disease. These all things must be done first on a lab scale which are called as standardisation of the protocol and then scaled up to industrial level.

3. The vaccine during its developmental stages elicits various kinds of responses which are never seen before in the wild type virus. This will be due to the fact that the vaccine is always developed from a recombinant host and hence to solve this problem one must always mutate the recombinant host several times so that the vaccine produced should only show immunogenic property in the host and not a pathogenic property. This can be achieved by first testing on the mammalian tissue culture and then on animal models.

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