Re: [DIYbio] RADVAC - (homebrew) Corona Vaccine

My take is usually the conservative one. :)

I don't think DIY medical bioscience is a viable or responsible route except in cases where no more professional approach is being done, or is available. So, whatever if you live somewhere with zero medical infrastructure or zero access to medicine, you do what you've gotta do. But people living where viable alternatives exist...

I also think that in this case, there's a difference between 'just peptides' and 'just peptides and adjuvents'. The nature of Adjuvents is that they make the immune system react more strongly (or extremely!) than usual to an antigen. That's often necessary when the antigen-dose of a vaccine might otherwise fade into the daily background hum of new antigens and fail to elicit a strong enough reaction. But it does mean that the immunogenicity of those peptides matters a _lot_ more than it usually would.

In other words, if there is some risk X of an immune overreaction to a peptide, and you add an adjuvent with some "adjuvent factor" Y, then your risk is now X * Y. Chitosan is probably not the strongest adjuvent out there , for sure. However, the strength of the reaction from the Chitosan is also probably _highly variable_ according to the grade of chitosan, the batch used, conditions of packaging and storage, and delivery method, volume, etcetera. Even the technique of the person doing the snorting probably matters, as it will affect where exactly the antigenic snuff ends up: upper nasal tract vs. deep lunch tissue!

And, I've worked in professional grade biomed research labs, and they're full of real humans with varying depths of knowledge and experience and risk appetite and fastidiousness. Deeply imperfect and 'doing their best'. And that's the gold standard you're trying to reach from a DIY setting: for all the good intentions in the world I think it's going to fall far short.

Finally, COVID has several methods of inducing severe reactions and lethal outcomes, and some of them relate to an immune overreaction, or an inappropriate immune response. I don't know how vaccine developers account for this stuff, or even if they do. But I could imagine a badly designed vaccine making this even worse: if by some (small) chance your vaccine _does_ elicit a reaction, it might end up being one that does much more harm than good. Say your body picks up on some epitope that usually occurs within the virus (and so the antibodies don't really affect real viruses), but when your body sees that exposed on an MHC complex it goes ballistic and triggers a cytokine storm: bad outcome.

Anyways that's my hot-take: it's not a risk I'd take, even for covid, while so little is known and so many better-prepared groups are working on better-considered vaccines.

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Aug 26, 2020, 17:56 by andreas.t.stuermer@gmail.com:

Has anyone looked deeper into RADVAC? 

https://radvac.org/white-paper/   

Basically they are working on a simple homebrew corona vaccine, by having peptides synthesized and mixing them with chitosan. 

The idea is that chitosan forms nanoparticles and takes up the peptides. Chitosan also acts as an adjuvant and stimulated both Th1 and Th2 response. 

The people there are already trying it on themselves and even George Church snorted it (not that that neccessarily means anything). 

The approch claims that it only uses materials and methods that have a long history of safe use.

Honestly, after the reports of long-term organ damage from Corona that doesn't look so crazy anymore? :D Worst case you snort some chitosan that gets degraded and some peptides that get turned into amino acids? Of course, I don't want to downplay the risks here. 

I just wonder what quality parameters you need. TFA content <1%? Quality parameter for peptides to not include truncated peptides or pepties missing amino acids? 

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