🎧 Listen: In today’s episode of The Journal podcast, reporter deniseroland explains the challenges of creating a vaccine for the respiratory virus RSV, which lands tens of thousands of babies and young children in hospitals each winter
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Dr. Juan Salazar: There are very few things that cause more distress than seeing a one month old or a two week old or a three month old who can't catch their breath.Dr. Juan Salazar: They're breathing very fast. They're irritable, they're crying. They have a fever, they can't feed. And to a parent to see that, it's something that causes a lot of emotion for good reason.
Dr. Juan Salazar: We don't have antiviral therapies for RSV. In the case of COVID, we have antiviral therapies. In the case of influenza, we have Tamiflu, which is an antiviral. For RSV, there is no specific antiviral therapy. What do we do? Basic things, the most important thing is we provide them supplemental oxygen. Very few fortunately, then require mechanical ventilation and manage of the airway, which actually helps them a lot.
Denise Roland: Yeah. Two kids died. It was a really, I guess very sobering and sort of troubling result for a trial, and that's I think set RSV vaccine development on a very cautious road. They proceeded very, very cautiously from then on, and they just ran into a lot of difficulties. There weren't many vaccines tried, they just weren't very effective.
Denise Roland: They figured out how to kind of lock the protein into its pre fusion form, which is the form that the vaccine developers wanted to target, and that's really the breakthrough that paved the way for all of these vaccines that we're seeing great data for now. Denise Roland: The pandemic did threaten to disrupt the clinical trials of these vaccines. The GSK vaccine for example, it was kind of ready to go into its big clinical trial, like the one on tens of thousands of people, and then the folks at GSK had a decision to make about when to start that trial because for a vaccine trial to work, you need the disease to actually be circulating because you need to show that folks on the placebo, catch this virus and people on the vaccine don't.
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