LESSWRONG
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All of fluffyclouds's Comments + Replies

Making Vaccine
fluffyclouds
30

Thank you, this is helpful - I've edited the parent post to include some of your feedback.

About the community: the only other place I've found so far is /r/radvac - though pretty dead, it may be useful to find people connected to the community. This page also mentions a Boston RaDVaC group.

I understand Arg319-Phe541 to mean the subsection of the spike protein that begins with arginine at position 319 and ends with phenylalanin at position 541.

This seems right - the RaDVaC white paper has a nicely formatted copy of the S protein on page 40, and it begi... (read more)

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8kjz
As someone who has worked in the labs a long time, I wouldn't worry about having to hit exactly -20 °C; that basically just means "freezer temperature". Lab freezers don't work any differently than home freezers as far as I can tell, although they do have certain safety features that a home freezer wouldn't. But the temperature can still vary a few degrees up or down, and it shouldn't affect your storage much. The (very) general rule of thumb is a difference of +/- 10 °C makes chemical reactions (such as peptide degradation) go 2x faster/slower. So even having to store in a fridge temporarily would only be ~4x faster than a freezer, still maybe good enough for one's purposes. The big difference comes for -20 °C vs -80 °C, since there you have a 2^6 or 64-fold rate difference. So something that can last for a month at -80 °C might degrade in half a day in a freezer. Hence the complex supply chains needed for such vaccines.
Making Vaccine
fluffyclouds
*230

Good point! I've attempted to expand on this a bit, and list the advantages that each vaccine currently seems to have over the other:

For RaDVaC:

  • Extensive Documentation, Whitepaper and reasoning about its development available
  • Manufacturing does not require a sterile environment
  • Simpler administration
  • Has a small community, might be easier to exchange questions and results
  • Regularly updated (possibly double-edged - seems very useful to keep up with any variant capable of immune escape, but may (?) make it more difficult to estimate efficacy across vaccine gener
... (read more)
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ChristianKl
130

Has a small community, might be easier to exchange questions and results

Given that this community exists it's likely that they somehow privately share results. It would be really interesting to know more about what's going on in that community.

as long as we knew what kind of Arg319-Phe541 peptide we need for it.

I understand Arg319-Phe541 to mean the subsection of the spike protein that begins with arginine at position 319 and ends with phenylalanin at position 541. At the moment I don't immediately find the sequence with googling but it's worth checki... (read more)

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Making Vaccine
fluffyclouds
40

Cerascreen offers an at-home antibody test. You use the kit you buy to draw a small blood sample at home and mail it to them. They use the ELISA method to test the blood for IgG antibodies and show you the result on a webpage. Not sure if this is available outside Germany, though maybe a different company offers something like this where you live.

Abbott also produces a blood test for IgG/IgM antibodies, except that it comes with a small test cassette that gives you the result directly, without sending it to a lab. Maybe importing this (or something similar) is an option for you.

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Making Vaccine
fluffyclouds
*270

There is another Covid-19 peptide vaccine developed by a Dr. Winfried Stöcker. He injected it into ≥64 volunteers, and the results he published look promising. They show both a good level of IgA, IgG and IgM antibodies and ≥ 94% neutralization for the vast majority of the test subjects. According to him (last paragraph of his blog post), none of the test subjects have reported any relevant adverse symptoms.

He describes the manufacturing in his blog (see translation below):

Man nehme dreimal 15 Mikrogramm rekombinante RBD der S1-Untereinheit (Arg319-Phe541)

... (read more)
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8caffemacchiavelli
Thanks for posting this, this looks excellent. It's my impression that you can indeed just buy the antigen needed - the lowest price for 1mg I found was around 900€. Allowing for 10% waste, this would cover 20 individuals at 45µg each. I looked at the antigen test results first and was worried that the vaccine wouldn't perform as well in live tests, but the neutralization results Stöcker posted are quite promising and a Nature study suggests that using 319–545 of the RBD is effective in providing immunity to live virus in primates. I don't expect the remaining amino acids will affect the results in a major way, so this looks quite promising indeed. I've asked a few people with more domain knowledge to comment on this and depending on their judgment (and access to sterile lab space) I might fund vaccines for myself and friends, given that Germany's vaccine rollout seems to be taking its time.
9ChristianKl
You need to work a lot more sterile when injecting then when you spray something in your nose. I'd rather have a few additional steps with less problems if I mess up some of the steps.