RADVAC - (homebrew) Corona Vaccine

[Andreas "Mega" Stuermer]

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? 

[Cathal Garvey]

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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[Andreas Stuermer]

Thanks for this elaborate answer!! 

As far as I know, antibody-mediated enhancement should probably come with B-cell but not T-cell response. 

I know that a lot of vaccine makers are using the Spike protein, which apparently has a domain that looks like healthy lung protein domain, which then causes the immune system to freak out and keep attacking healthy tissue. Smart people have told me, though, that that probably wouldn't matter in a vaccine because the body would clear autoreactive cells. 

Chitosan being variable is a great point - one should look to get the highest grade of course. And all from the same source... 

I'm not entirely keen on trying it, but been contemplating. I signed up for a Corona vaccine trial (MVA based, so pretty promising in my opinion) in Germany but they said I live too far away. But my country is stone-age. I am 100% certain I won't get a chance before the second wave hits and it gets bad. And with the current level of stupidity... People either don't think that Corona is real, or that it's no worse than the flu (27% of the people in a survey), people wearing masks below their noses.  

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[David Murphy]

I very much agree with cathal.

This is one area where anything that is "potentially effective" is also "potentially very dangerous"

You're trying to add something to your immune systems blacklist.

The Pandemrix Influenza vaccine caused permanent narcolepsy in some patients because it targeted a receptor very similar to a receptor on the surface of certain types of neurons which the patient's immune system then wiped out.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5253292/

Assuming that it's safe just because the precursors are safe is about as wise as assuming that since hydrogen carbon and nitrogen are safe then hydrogen cyanide should be fine.

You could leave yourself with your own immune system eating away chunks of your brain.

Mainstream vaccine researchers specialising in the area are going to be much more aware of what to be careful of.

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[Brian Degger]

we spent significant energy making codes for operating in diybio in 2011

https://diybio.org/codes/ 
 DIYbio.org organized a series of congresses in 2011, where we brought together individuals and delegates from regional groups in North America and Europe to collaborate on the development of a DIYbio code that may serve as a framework for helping us achieve a vibrant, productive and safe global community of DIYbio practitioners, regional groups, and community labs.
In May 2011, individuals and delegates from regional groups of DIY biologists from across Europe came together at the London School of Economics BIOS Centre with the goal of generating an aspirational code of ethics for the emerging do-it-yourself biology movement. The congress was composed of participants from five countries, including Denmark, England, France, Germany, and Ireland .

In July 2011, a second congress was held in San Francisco with participants from regional DIYbio groups across North America, including individuals from ARC (Houston, TX), BioBridge (San Francisco, CA), BioCurious (Mountain View, CA), BOSSLab (Boston, MA), Genspace (Brooklyn, NY), and LA Biohackers (Los Angeles, CA).

 

what you proposing is guerilla science, the science that is used at the end of life. think steve jobs and his self experimentation with untried therapies for a inoperable cancer  

ONE gorilla scientist/biohacker has already died from self-exp.

my hot take,

Brian

@drbrian

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Brian Degger

twitter: @drbrian

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[Andreas "Mega" Stuermer]

> what you proposing is guerilla science,  

I wasn't exactly "proposing" that - as I am in no way involved with the RADVAC people. But you certainly have a point. 

I just recntly came across an ethics paper about the legality and ethics of DIY corona vaccines. I haven't read it yet as it is behind a paywall 

[Dixon Cox]

Yes, looking into it and working on sourcing ingredients for it.  It's difficult to find a reliable peptide supplier because there are many scam operations that will send you an empty tube with a nice label instead of a real product. Chitosan is ~$50 from Sigma.

Overall, this is a very well designed concept and no trial on 30,000 people is needed to "prove" that biology works.

[Dixon Cox]

This is not "guerilla science" and Steve Jobs died from cancer, not from any "biohacking".  As a side note, taking supplements is not "biohacking".

[Brian M. Delaney]

I believe GenScript is a reliable source.

https://www.genscript.com/peptide-services.html?src=service

Sigma is great for the other dry ingredients.

Brian

[Brian M. Delaney]

I became fascinated with RaDVaC as soon as I learned about it in July. I studied the white paper, read most of the references carefully, and decided to take, and make, the vaccine. In fact, I've now created a "mobile RaDVaC lab" that fits in a small suitcase, and have traveled with it to help show people how to make the vaccine. (Then I just leave the equipment with them, and buy more. It's a few hundred dollars for a complete set-up.)

I think the project is brilliant.

http://infinitefaculty.org/RaDVaC/Decision_tree.html

Brian

https://radvac.org/

[Bun Bun]

I have found surprisingly little discussion on radvac. Is there a more active forum somewhere?

Considering how cheap it is and the fact that most of the planet won't have any shot at vaccination for years I'd expect a lot more interesi.

[Andrew Frishman]

Is there a video with the showing the  "mobile RaDVaC lab and how to create a DIY vaccine...interested?

[Sean Sullivan]

friend of mine just sent me this website where a person describes making the RaDVaC at home and taking it. Definitely worth reading if you want a detailed testimonial:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/niQ3heWwF6SydhS7R/making-vaccine

[Brian M. Delaney]

Pardon the belated reply – we've been swamped with the development of
the next generation of the vaccine, which is now ready [1], as well as
the design of our clinical trial (for which we now have received some
initial funding).

A video is a great idea, I'll bring it up at our next meeting. But if
anyone reading this who's made the vaccine can take the initiative and
make a video, that would be great! We're all volunteers, so our day jobs
plus the trial design effort dsn't leave us a lot of extra time.

About a more active forum: so many people wanted to communicate
discreetly that discussions have ended up being mostly via a bunch of
separate email threads. But that's kind of irritating. If someone
started a discussion forum, I would be happy to participate.

Thanks,
Brian

[1] https://radvac.org/white-paper/

> <http://infinitefaculty.org/RaDVaC/Decision_tree.html>
>
> Brian

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Brian M. Delaney
Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC)
radvac.org