COVID-19 Bullets

•  New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in hot water now that the state "has reported 8,600 nursing home deaths tied to the coronavirus since the pandemic began. Overall COVID-19 deaths in the Empire State exceed 40,000. ... New York only counted residents who died on nursing home property, rather than any who were transferred to hospitals. But according to the report, most of the deaths occurred in hospitals.
•  The vaccination situation in Canada is even worse than that in the US. "The Canadian deficit is mostly because they don’t have enough vaccine. Canada bought doses but they didn’t invest in capacity and a deal with China fell through. As a result, Canada won’t be getting lots of vaccine until March or April."
• I mentioned mRNA scaling as an update to my roundup of recent Derek Lowe blog posts, and also in the comments there. Someone was kind enough to give an extended reply, which I repost here in its entirety:

  It is possible BUT there are several hurdles to overcome.

  1) Raw materials. You need recombinant *GMP quality* (as in, NOT lab quality) enzymes. These can certainly be made, the technology existed even when I was an undergrad back in the Clinton/Kurt Cobain era. Bacterial fermentation at smallish scale and relatively easy to do. Since they’re being used for industrial processing and not put into humans, you can do convenient things to improve the process like stick 6his tags on the end and tether them to IMAC resin to better control the reaction rate and set yourself up for continuous methods.

  2) Liposome/LNP formulation needs to be done by process engineers who actually know a little something about liposome manufacturing. Sanofi has these, or should have, or can afford to hire them and keep them.

  3) Different kinds of lipids and a wider variety need to be at least tried out, instead of this whole getting married to just one other startup’s lipid and then having a patent pissing contest with them. Never restrict yourself to a single source of anything, there is far too much risk that one source will go out of business and you’ll be screwed, unless you plan for vertical integration and make the lipids yourself at a small molecules site within your company. Which Sanofi also has the resources to do if they choose.

  4) The medicinal chemists need to choose targets appropriate for the PK of intracellular transient expression. Alnylam did an excellent job of thoroughly understanding the PK of their modality, and Sanofi should follow their example.

  Hope That Helps!