Follow this Seattle scientist as he’s injected in COVID-19 vaccine project – KUOW News and Information

Ian Haydon of Seattle is part of a project to develop an experimental COVID-19 vaccine. He got his first injection on Wednesday morning.

The vaccine is being developed by a Boston-based company called Moderna. It involves the use of something called messenger RNA to try to prompt the body's immune system to fight the virus.

Haydon himself is a trained scientist and science writer. He works as a communication manager at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, which itself also develops vaccines. He spoke to KUOW's David Hyde about how the vaccine would work, and about his own experience (KUOW will follow his progress in the program).

Ian Haydon: It's a little bit like getting ready to go on a big trip where, you know, you've you've been thinking about this thing and counting down the days and then all the sudden it's upon you.

David Hyde: What's your understanding of what this vaccine is attempting to do and how it does it and how that compares to other vaccines that we're more familiar with, like the regular flu vaccine?

Haydon: Normally, a vaccine would work by taking either an entire virus that has been killed or just a piece of that virus and injecting it into a healthy person in hopes that their immune system is going to recognize it and respond by making antibodies. And then the hope is those antibodies protect that person from an actual infection. What's going on here is a little bit different than that.

What I'll actually be receiving is a little snippet of the virus's genetic code. In this case, a single MRNA, molecule messenger RNA, and that genetic code is going to hopefully enter my cells and temporarily instruct them to make one of the proteins from the virus -- in this case, the spike protein, and it's that spike protein if it gets made that hopefully my immune system is going to react to, it's going to make antibodies against it. And hopefully those antibodies would be protective against the real virus.

Hyde: What vaccines are currently out there that have used messenger RNA?

Haydon: I don't believe there are any licensed vaccines that have used this MRNA technology. The same platform is in clinical testing now for other diseases, but none has produced a license vaccine yet. And it may not. It's not yet known whether this way of stimulating the immune system is actually going to work in humans.

Hyde: So you're almost like a vaccine astronaut in a way.

Haydon: I guess so. Yeah. I don't think I'm particularly unique in wanting to step up into this trial. I actually consider myself quite fortunate for getting in, being healthy enough to get in.

Hyde: You're taking on a certain amount of personal risk to try to benefit the rest of us, hopefully through the development of a safe vaccine. What is your sense of the risks that you face by participating in this clinical trial?

Haydon: I understand the risks to be quite small, but there are a few of them. One thing that may happen is sort of the day of the injection. Some patients who receive this type of experimental vaccine report some pain in their arm. They've reported headaches, redness at the site of the injection. And those effects, which usually last just about a day, can be severe. So that's on my mind, other risks. You know, this is a new virus and we don't know how it interacts with the immune system.

And this is a new vaccine and we don't really know what it is doing to the immune system just yet. So in very rare cases, an experimental vaccine can actually make infection worse where your body does produce antibodies, but those make it easier for the virus to infect you rather than blocking infection. So that's one of the things that clinical trials for any coronavirus vaccine are going to have to evaluate. And it's one of the reasons why you can't just rush a promising vaccine out of the laboratory and start giving it to a lot of people. You really need to know whether or not it's safe and well tolerated and also whether it's effective in blocking the infection.

Hyde: So part of what you're doing is making sure that in the future, hopefully, there's going to be a vaccine that's safe for all of us.

Haydon: That's right. And I'm in a Phase 1 study, which is just the very first step in that long process. Then comes Phase 2 and 3 in those later stages. It's not just safety that's being evaluated, but it's efficacy of the vaccine as well.

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Follow this Seattle scientist as he's injected in COVID-19 vaccine project - KUOW News and Information