Science Questions

Is it possible to create an intelligent vaccine or a drug that could evolve with the ever changing strains of the disease? Mario

We put this question to Dr Melanie McCullagh:

Melanie -  That’s a very interesting question. I’m not sure that you would actually want a vaccine to evolve too much just in case once you set it loose in the wild you would risk some kind of a vaccine epidemic. I think what you can definitely do is apply selection pressure to the bacteria to change the types of molecules that they produce. That’s a similar kind of concept.

Chris -  I would think that probably this is going to be big business in the future. We’re only just beginning to understand how molecules actually look. By turning this round in this way we can now start with what we want to end up with and then go back to the gene and tweak that. That’s quite a novel thing to be doing. Probably going to be a major way of doing this in the future.

Melanie -  There are some real advances in technology at the moment that I think will enable us to expand greatly what we can do with genetically engineering the bacteria that produce these polyketides. Biotica’s a very small company but I think there’s a really big area for us to build into with increasingly novel technologies as things move on.

July 2008