Question (from a regular joe): is the platform used for mRNA vaccines interchangeable ? Same design and fabrication process, but different payloads ? Or do different mRNA material imply different lipid shells ?
Yes. The ‘platform’ is like a notebook in a ziplock bag. Write the code for $VACCINE in the notebook, place it in the bag, give it to a person. Very interchangeable.
At some point I read that it was useless to release IP on the vaccine itself because the fabrication process is way more complicated and has way more patents on it. Is that true ?
I think the best way to describe the situation is akin to cooking. Imagine the best chef in the world, Michelin stars and all.
Would a written recipe of a 10 course meal result in the same final product?
How about a video of the full preparation?
How about if you went into the kitchen and shadowed them for a few hours?
At what point would you feel confident in your ability to replicate the chef's final product? Would you then be considered the best chef in the world?
How much of the chef's time would you like to take away from serving at their restaurant to training new chefs? What if it was in the middle of Friday night dinner rush? What if that dinner rush was 2 years long and instead of people being hungry, people were dying?
These are the questions I don't see anyone wrestling with in these discussions. Would you trust the expert chef to train new chef's themselves? Or have some outside person, say a bbq expert chef, simply read our above example chef's notes and go for it?
This isn't like high school science where you follow a protocol and out comes a thing. You can't even see the thing you're making! What about instead of taste, you had to rely on touch only to decide if the whole thing was identical (i.e., the analytics are just as complex as the manufacturing). Making these vaccines is much more akin to cooking because the platform/technology is so new.
It took decades for biosimilar antibodies to be approved. Note they don't call them generics--because the product is so complex the process is the product. This was also because the number of experts able to start up new manufacturing took time to get expertly trained.
I would trust the chef to scale-up their apprentices to ensure Quality (with a capital Q) instead of an obviously smart expert chef from some other field to just read the recipe and go for it.
I followed the analogies and the problems you point to and I do agree it's no easy feat to reproduce but I think it doesn't address the question of patents of the many steps: do we need patents to the kitchen sink, a kitchen sink we absolutely need to cook the meal ?
My understanding is that the mRNA payload codes for specific protein production and the lipid envelope is there to protect the fragile mRNA payload during storage and delivery.
