And yes, AlphaFold is a major milestone, but I don’t think we’ve solved protein folding for good.
I'm sure there is also the commercial concerns about cannibalising their own product. Would you take the 1-strain BioNTech vaccine if you knew that a 5-strain is also in circulation?
*when paid annually
First, BioNTech (not Pfizer) had 10-15 years to research, develop and test vaccines against new zoogenic Corona viruses. There was literature regarding the modification of the spike protein even before SARS-CoV-2 hit. BioNTech had either SARS or MERS candidates years before the pandemic.
Second, we cannot compute "how it will fold" either.
Third, discussions on HN always, always leave out the hard and messy parts: Wet lab and patient studies.
I am a huge fan of mRNA vaccinations, but the understanding of their potential is hugely different between the "hacker world" (HN, Twitter computer scientist bubble, etc.) and the biology world.
It doesn't seem meaningful to define development time without including all the steps required to provided an available vaccine to the public
> Now, the thing is that you can’t just sequence a virus, do bioinformatics, synthesize mRNA and package it into a nano particle.
You can, and that's exactly what was done. However, out of the 10 or so candidates, they selected a few of the more promising ones to continue research.
They are fast to develop. However, there are other steps in the pipeline that aren't so fast.
> The mRNA that gets packaged needs to be modified (I believe with alternative bases) to achieve desired effect.
That's the easy part. The full mRNA sequence is not that large (https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...) and many of such substitutions can be done by algorithms. Now, maybe the modified protein won't fold right. That's not as easy (although, we can compute how it will fold now).
> If mRNA vaccine was as magical as it was marketed, we wouldn’t be getting 3-4(and soon 5?) doses of the same vaccine with the emergence of new variants.
If we were reckless and just wanted to inject someone with the latest update, this could be done in a matter of days. Human trials took months and people still complained that it was 'developed too quickly'. Then there's logistics.