How I learned to stop worrying and love the bug […]

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bug 🦠

For my birthday Sunday night, I hosted a dinner at work for the Institute of Protein Design — the bastion of intelligent design at the University of Washington. We discussed their brand new coronavirus vaccine, a therapeutic cure in development and a variety of even-more amazing biologics in the pipeline.

Oh, and we should expect that 30-70% of all of us will get the coronavirus this time around, and the rest next winter.

David Baker and Neil King use large pools of computers (GPU banks and Rosetta@Home) to computationally design functional proteins, for example, to bind to specific invariant surface coat proteins of a target virus (to be robust to evolutionary countermeasures) or to create a self-assembling nanocage decorated with a floral arrangement of epitopes to trigger a B-cell response (i.e., more potent and broad-spectrum vaccines). Baker had just learned that their crash-effort on the new coronavirus vaccine worked, and it might be better than others. They got the genetic sequence while the outbreak was still limited to China and went from sequence to vaccine in 42 days.
• More info on nanoparticle vaccines: https://www.ipd.uw.edu/2019/03/ipds-first-nanoparticle-vaccine/
• And a pre-print of the coronavirus strategy as recently applied for an HIV vaccine: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.31.929273v1

They are also computing novel nanoparticle binders to target sites on 2019-nCoV predicted to neutralize the virus or interfere with its ability to infect cells. This would be a prophylactic and therapeutic, and it might have a shorter regulatory approval than the 18 months expected for novel vaccines (where safety studies are paramount, given the use in healthy people). They have had earlier success using this with influenza.
• More: https://www.bakerlab.org/index.php/2017/09/28/new-article-nature-designing-testing-20000-new-protein-drug-candidates/
• They are also using proteins to selectively bind semiconductors and other interesting inorganics: https://newsroom.uw.edu/news/protein-design-named-audacious-project-0

So, if we are all going to get the virus, why not worry? Their advice if you are showing symptoms: just stay home and ride it out. It might be more dangerous to visit the hospital for testing. And certainly more stressful.

[addendum: those initial low death rates did not come for free. ICU availability made a big difference. See: https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727 ]