Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Q and A with the experts: mRNA vaccine production

The University of Waterloo has a number of experts available to speak about issues relating to COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the successful advancement of mRNA vaccine technology. This has however left many people wondering how it is mRNA vaccines were developed so quickly. Bill Anderson, professor emeritus in chemical engineering, provides answers to this and other questions.

How do mRNA vaccines work? 

mRNA vaccines provide your cells with a blueprint (mRNA) on how to construct a fragment of the virus.  The “blueprint” doesn’t last very long in your cells, so there is no permanent effect on them.  However, your body learns to recognize and attack the viral fragment that your cells produced, so that if you are infected with the virus in the future you already have the immunological “army” primed and ready to fight it.  

The fundamental concept is similar to other vaccines which use injections of fragments or inactivated viruses that can’t reproduce.  The difference is that the mRNA vaccines use your own cells to produce the target fragments, and importantly they can be quicker and easier to scale up and manufacture.

The mRNA vaccine itself is simply the mRNA blueprint material held within a nanoparticle package which serves two important functions.  It protects the mRNA, since it is quickly and easily destroyed in the body, and it helps the mRNA get into your cells where the blueprint gets read and the viral fragments are constructed.

How were mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 developed so quickly?

The COVID-19 vaccines were produced very quickly, but only because there is a long development history behind the mRNA platform.  The existence of mRNA in cells was confirmed in 1961.  The successful use of a synthetic mRNA injected into an animal was reported in 1990.  One of the COVID-19 developers, Moderna Therapeutics, was founded in 2010 to commercialize mRNA technologies for infectious diseases and cancer.  Google Scholar lists over 250,000 research papers mentioning “mRNA vaccines” prior to 2020 when COVID-19 wasn’t even known yet.  So, in some ways, this vaccine has decades of development work behind it.

The mRNA technology is a type of platform, into which you can plug various “blueprints” to target different diseases.  Once the virus responsible for COVID-19 was identified and genetically sequenced, companies just had to determine which part of the blueprint to use for the best effect.  Once that was done and tested, manufacturing could be quickly ramped up.

What makes the technology behind mRNA vaccines so good?

The mRNA platform is great from a manufacturing point of view. It can essentially be done in a vat in a few hours with a mixture of known starting materials and some enzymes, followed by some purification and packaging (all under pharmaceutical-grade manufacturing conditions of course).  Unlike many traditional vaccines, it doesn’t rely on growing any cells or harvesting them for further processing and multiple purification steps.  Pharmaceutical products that are manufactured using growing cells can take days or weeks to process from beginning to end, can be much harder to scale up, and have more chances of something going wrong in the manufacturing process, resulting in a batch that has to be destroyed and wasted time.  

What are the benefits of mRNA vaccines? 

As noted above, from a development perspective the simplicity and rapidity of the mRNA platform is a key benefit.  This has allowed the world to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses in only a matter of months from a limited number of manufacturing facilities. As more production capacity is developed and brought online the response can accelerate further worldwide.

In the longer term, now that the acceptable safety and good efficacy of a vaccine from an mRNA platform has been proven in humans at a very large scale, this may open up and accelerate further opportunities for treating other diseases.  Researchers have been working on other infectious diseases such as influenza, Zika and Ebola viruses, as well as some cancers, so this success may spur more investment in these efforts.

William A. Anderson is a Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department and the former Director of Admissions for the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on photochemical (UV) and biological air and water pollution control and biochemical engineering of fermentation and pharmaceutical processes, reactor engineering for photocatalysis and photolysis, using an ultraviolet light irradiated catalyst to degrade organic contaminants at ambient temperatures. He is frequently consulted by industry and others on the use of UV germicidal devices for disinfection of air, surfaces, and water.

A second-place finish for WATonomous in the AutoDrive Challenge

By Carol Truemner. This article originally appeared on Waterloo News.

Waterloo’s student-led autonomous vehicle team pulled into second place in the final stage of the four-year international SAE AutoDrive Challenge.

The competition, which ended last month, had teams convert a stock Chevrolet Bolt EV into a fully autonomous vehicle.

WATonomous completed the last leg of the competition with its best results to date, improving on the team’s third-place finish in the third year of the competition.

Advised by Waterloo Engineering professors Derek Rayside and William Melek, the current 50-member team is headed by Charles Zhang, a computer science student, and Rowan Dempster, a computer engineering master’s candidate.  Throughout the four years, approximately 800 undergraduate and graduate students worked on transforming the vehicle as described in the YouTube video below. 

During the challenge, WATonomous supported 12 Waterloo Engineering Capstone Design projects and collaborated with research groups such as the Mechatronics Vehicle Systems Lab and Autonomoose.

“The AutoDrive Challenge has been an amazing opportunity for students at the University of Waterloo to explore and contribute to the future of autonomous vehicles with industry leaders such as GM and MathWorks,” said Zhang, current captain of WATonomous.

Like last year’s challenge, the 2021 competition was held online because of COVID-19 restrictions across North America.

Two weeks of remote judging resulted in the following awards for WATonomous:

• Overall: 2nd Place;
• Safety + Technical Reports: 1st Place;
• Social Responsibility Report: 2nd Place;
• Social Responsibility Event: 3rd Place;
• Concept Design Report: 3rd Place.

The AutoDrive Challenge launched in 2017 with eight universities from across Canada and the U.S.

Besides Waterloo, competitors included Kettering University, Michigan State University, Michigan Tech University, North Carolina A&T State University, Texas A&M University, the University of Toronto (U of T) and Virginia Tech. U of T took first place in this year's challenge.

“Despite the SAE AutoDrive Challenge ending this year, WATonomous is committed to being a major contributor to autonomous driving research and development at the University of Waterloo,” said a release written by Matthew Picozzi, a mechatronics engineering student and the team's marketing manager. “The team is continuing to develop its autonomous driving platform and is strengthening its research initiatives and industry partnerships.”

Delivering lifelong learning

By Patty Mah. This article originally appeared on Waterloo News.

Current and future professionals are not only required to have the skills and knowledge to work within an ever-changing, technology-driven future, but to also adapt effectively to a potentially ongoing virtual environment as the world continues to grapple with our current global pandemic.  

For the last four decades, the School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) has worked closely with the Chartered Professional Accountants of Ontario (CPA Ontario) in reviewing and updating our robust curriculum with the required competencies to educate and prepare graduates to become accounting and finance (A&F) professionals with the breadth and adaptability to work within disruption.  

However, as disruption continues at an exceptional rate, new graduates and early career professionals are already falling behind in the key skills and knowledge within five to 10 years of graduating. It is more important than ever to provide opportunities for lifelong learning and the SAF and CPA Ontario are poised to deliver.  

One competency gap identified with early-career professionals is the management and analysis of big data. To address this multi-faceted topic, SAF and CPA Ontario have partnered with WatSPEED, a new unit at Waterloo that provides professional education positioned at the intersections of technology and business, aimed at professionals and leaders.  

Predictive Analytics for CPAs is WatSPEED's first digital certificate and will be, for the first time, open to early-career A&F professionals. Here, they will learn to add project value without needing to know code or develop models themselves. The digital certificate aims to enhance expertise in dealing with large data sets and to provide the skills to use data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data. 

"Through this strategic partnership between WatSPEED, SAF and CPAO, Waterloo aims to build on its longstanding culture of innovation to transform lifelong learning and professional education to support the workforce of the future,” says Sanjeev Gill, associate vice-president, innovation and acting director, WatSPEED. “This course offering will address a skills gap in the accounting and finance profession, allowing our alumni and other professionals to enhance their expertise and keep pace with emerging technologies.” 

Partnerships for the next generation of professionals 

Having forecasted the need for A&F professionals to work with, manage and effectively analyze/interpret big data, SAF has introduced a business analytics specialization into the Accounting and Financial Management undergraduate programming.  

“We’ve had a long and mutually respectful relationship with CPA Ontario and educating professionals at Waterloo is a win-win-win opportunity,” states Steve Fortin (PhD ’00, CPA CA, ICD.D), SAF director. “We’re meeting the needs of one of our most important stakeholders [CPAs], we’re offering our expertise in curriculum and teaching to provide lifelong learning to professionals and we're leveraging WatSPEED's expertise to deliver the programming."

In an increasingly data-centric world, CPAs are influencing the data journey and defining how that information is used to affect change and reporting. As the world shifts to prepare for a post-pandemic reality, businesses will be looking to CPAs to help them measure and interpret big data in a way that is rigorous, thoughtful and bold. 

“Leveraging the strength of our partnership with the University of Waterloo’s School of Accounting and Finance, CPA Ontario remains committed to providing learning solutions that equip CPAs for the future needs of our profession. This partnership with Waterloo gives our members the opportunity to access learning to further develop the skills to meet the demands in a disrupted and fast-changing environment,” says Craig Smith, executive vice-president of Member and Student Services, CPA Ontario. “And with the creation of this unique digital certificate in partnership with SAF and WatSPEED, we will better prepare our profession for the next frontier of business.”