Coronavirus vaccine

1. Covid-19 vaccine
Prepared by
Yousef Elshrek

2. • COVID-19 VACCINE
• This is how coronavirus invades your body.
• Sinking its crown-like spikes into your cells, using molecular deception to
pick their locks, and hijacking your body.
• But there is one way to prevent this.
• By using one of the virus's weapons on itself…
• Right now, there's 7 billion people all waiting for the same thing:
• A vaccine that will protect us from the virus causing COVID-19.
• If you want to know what's in it… what makes it work?
• Making a vaccine and getting it out to the public is a long process with a lot
of steps, so scientists can make sure the vaccine is safe and effective
• It's typical for that to take ten years or more, in an emergency, like this
pandemic, they can't skip any of those steps, but they can speed this up by
doing some at the same time. But none of that can happen until you figure
out the first step:

3. • What do they put in the vaccine that will make it protect people. …and it's
what we're going to talk about in this presentation.
• Some scientists who study the coronavirus to learn how they used it to
design this.
• The key ingredient inside the very first COVID-19 vaccines.
• Here’s their goal To show you what exactly is in the new COVID vaccines
that makes them work—and how they got made faster than any vaccine in
history.
• They hope is that you'll be better informed when you get your shot, and you'll
have a new appreciation for why science like this is so important.
• This is how to make a COVID-19 vaccine.
• Scientists study how pathogens like the coronavirus cause disease…

4. • There are four human coronaviruses that occur seasonally and
generally cause the common cold.
• Three coronaviruses that have caused pandemics, nd that’s:
1. The first is SARS coronavirus back in 2002.
2. The second one is MERS coronavirus in 2012.
3. The third one is now SARS-CoV-2, which emerged earlier 2019
year.
• So, at the end of December 2019, it was on the news that there's these
pneumonia clusters in China , in the scientific community, they
thought maybe a new flu virus or possibly a coronavirus.
• As soon as researchers in China decoded the virus' genome and
published it online, Scientists could start designing a vaccines soon as
they get the sequence, they are going to race on this thing and move as
quickly as they can.

5. • In early January, the sequence was released online publicly.
• That's when the clock started ticking.
• WHAT DOES A VACCINE DO?
• It trains your immune system to know what a germ, like a virus, looks like.
• So, it can recognize the germ, fight it off, and keep you safe, without you getting
sick.
• This is the virus that causes COVID-19.
• The outer shell is made of a few different kinds of proteins/
• These proteins sticking off the side are the most important part is the spike
https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/ZlVWCywvJ5SfQ_VDs7R5dQ/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTcwNTtjZj13ZWJw/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_conversation_464/819badf341135c9792db04b0ecfd89db

6. • These spikes are what give this
family of viruses their name.
• The coronaviruses, they look
kind a like a crown.
The coronavirus uses these spike
to sneak into host cells.

7. • The 3-dimensional shape
of virus spike is super
important, because that
exact shape is what lets
the virus latch on to
receptors on the outside
of host cells, almost like
picking a lock and then, it
sneaks inside (1) 3-dimensional shape of that spike virus latch on
receptors on the outside of human cells (2) Started
sneaks into a human cell (3) Empty its content in a
human cell (4) Coronavirus entered the cell and
hijacked and controlled a human cell completely.

8. • Those shapes sticking out on
the outside of a virus are also
what your immune system is
feeling for, to figure out if
this is a foreign invader if it
should attack or not.
• The problem is, the first time
your body sees a virus, your
immune system responds so
slowly that the virus has time
to make copies of itself, and
you can still get very, very
sick.
The first time your body sees a virus,
your immune system responds so slowly
that the virus has time to make copies of
itself

9. • THAT IS WHAT IS GREAT ABOUT A VACCINE.
• It trains your immune system what to look for, so when the actual virus shows up,
host cells can respond super-fast and destroy the virus before it has a chance to
hijack host cells.
• WHAT'S IN A VACCINE?
• On past a vaccine has a weakened or dead the virus.
• That's how polio and measles and mumps, and some other vaccines work, but these
days, a vaccine usually just contains a little piece of the virus.
• The newest COVID-19 vaccines, They are just the spike, these spike working as a
vaccine, to train immune system to recognize the actual virus, it must have the same
3-dimensional shape as the spike overall, complete virus.
• But making the spike all by itself, not attached to the rest of the virus, turns out to
be hard.
• Because the spike is actually pretty floppy just floating around on its own.
• It doesn't look much like the spike on the actual virus, and this is the key
• For years scientists had studied SARS and MERS viruses, which are really closely
related to the virus that causes COVID.

10. • So, they already knew what tiny tweaks to make to freeze coronavirus spikes
in the perfect shape.
• So, they got to work designing their stabilizing mutations into the new spike
sequence.
• There was just two amino acids that they knew would, if they mutated them
that would stabilize the spike protein and make it a lot easier to work with in
the laboratory.
• A protein, like the coronavirus spike is a long, folded chain of individual units
of amino acids.
• These chains of amino acids are built using code written in RNA, and stored
in DNA by changing, or "mutating" the letters of DNA code, they can change
the amino acids in host protein chain.
• It is like building scaffolding into the protein, to be like "freeze in this shape."
• .

11. • HOW DO YOU GET FROM THERE TO MAKING THE ACTUAL SPIKE
PROTEIN?
• Scientists can grow special immortal human cells outside the body which they use
as factories
• They put a modified gene for something like their spike protein, into those cells and
then they'll start synthesizing this protein
• So, they're just pumping it out into the liquid?
• They take that liquid, run it through special purification machines, and can be able
to isolate a pure sample of their spike protein.
• But how do they know for sure that this special spike protein looks like the real
thing, 3-D shape?
• They take pictures of it using a big Science Machine, that called a cryo-electron
microscope.
• This type of microscope took a 3D picture of the coronavirus spike, and helped
design the first COVID-19 vaccines
• Check out the big science machine! It looks like a giant microwave

12. • WHY CAN’T SCIENTISTS JUST USE A REGULAR LIGHT
MICROSCOPE TO TAKE A PICTURE OF A PROTEIN?
• The wavelength of visible light is on the order of hundreds of nanometers.
and that means the smallest things you can see with visible light are also on
the scale of hundreds of nanometers.
• But what they want to see the atoms in a protein molecule they're angstroms
(1.0 angstrom × 10-10 meters) apart, tenths of a nanometer, so they can not use
visible light.
• Scientists must use a special electron microscope.
• So super high energy electrons make very tiny wavelengths, which lets them
see very, very small resolution things.
• They want a camera like that. That's better than 4k.
• They can go angstrom-K.

13. • So, to take a 3D picture of a protein with a cryo-electron microscope.
• First, they put a drop of protein onto a special metal grid.
• Then they freeze it in place with liquid ethane.
• When they shoot a beam of electrons at it, those proteins will be in all kinds of
random orientations, some like this, some like that.
• Each orientation leaves a particular "shadow".
• Powerful computers look at all those 2D images and combine them into a final 3D
shape.
• And when they looked at the spike they made, with their tiny little tweaks and
mutations, their spike has the same 3D shape as the spike on the whole virus.
• Now they can put that spike into people, and see if it trains their immune system,
and protects them from the real virus.
• It works. This protects people from COVID-19.
• The results of these researches, is literally what's being used in the very first
COVID-19 vaccines, and some of those vaccines work in a really good.

14. • Instead of having to make the actual spike protein, in big factories,
with huge tanks of cells like the ones they saw some of these new
vaccines, the genetic instructions for making the spike is all that's in
the shot, on a molecule called mRNA.
• Your body uses those instructions (mRNA) to make the spike.
• cells are the factory.
• A year ago, no one had ever seen this virus before, and thanks to these
scientists and thousands of others around the world, now we have
vaccines that work.
• It's going to take months, maybe years to get these vaccines, and the
dozens of others still being worked on, to the billions of people that
need them, and that is a huge challenge on its own.

15. • No vaccine in history has ever been invented this fast, and they were able
to do it safely.
• Scientists were able to do this so quickly, they were studying basic
scientific questions about other coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS,
they've spent years trying to figure out their secrets, so when this one
showed up, they were already ten steps ahead.
• REFERENCES
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoVJCx6XXMM
• https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/ZlVWCywvJ5SfQ_VDs7R5dQ/YXB
waWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTcwNTtjZj13ZWJw/https://media.zenfs.
com/en/the_conversation_464/819badf341135c9792db04b0ecfd89db