We’ve had effective COVID vaccines for more than a year, but there are still countries where less than 10% of people have received a dose. Omicron has been spreading for almost three months, but pharma companies have only just started testing variant-specific shots. mRNA vaccines are highly effective, but they’re hard to manufacture and nearly impossible to distribute in parts of the developing world.
We won’t be ready for the next variant, or the next pandemic, until these problems are solved.
An ideal vaccine platform for pandemic preparedness would be fast, effective, cheap, robust, and scalable enough to reach a critical portion of the global population as soon as any new pathogen is identified. Ideas have been floating around the EA biosecurity community for years about what such a platform would look like, and what it would take to build it, but there hasn’t been much direct work in the space.
The most recent COVID wave convinced a few of us that it was time for that to change, so we launched Alvea to rapidly develop and deploy an Omicron-specific vaccine. In doing so, we’re aiming to build a platform for responding to future COVID variants or other novel pathogens, and to massively level up the technical, operational, clinical, organizational, and logistical capabilities of the longtermist biosecurity community.
We’ve initially structured Alvea as a three-month sprint to test the hypothesis that an exceptionally bright, dedicated group of people can quickly accomplish remarkable things in this space. In the past eight weeks, we’ve built a team of 35 drug developers, logistics experts, physicians, operators, and scientists to bring the project to fruition. We’re supported by a network of consultants and partners with deep experience in every aspect of vaccine development and infectious disease response.
Many of us are longtermist EAs who believe this project has a shot at transformative impact on biosecurity. All of us are committed to radically improving vaccine development, and are working around the clock to make this happen.
Our strategy at Alvea is simple: We’re building a streamlined platform for developing and deploying DNA vaccines using safe, well-validated components. DNA vaccines function similarly to mRNA vaccines, but are easier to produce and can be shipped around the world with no special storage requirements. Ultimately, we expect people to be able to easily self-administer our vaccines anywhere on the planet.
Getting our vaccines into the clinic—and out to the places where they’re needed—requires solving a staggering number of problems in preclinical development, manufacturing, international regulation, clinical trial design, logistics, and other areas, all at the same time. In many cases, the standard approaches to these problems are riddled with crippling inefficiencies. We’re eliminating those when we can, and building from scratch when we can’t.
In the 60 days since our inception, we’ve designed twelve versions of our Omicron vaccine, responded to the emergence of the BA.2 subvariant, produced hundreds of doses of our lead candidate, run preclinical experiments in mice and sheep, kicked off scalable manufacturing processes, planned Phase I and II clinical studies, and identified potential partner countries for accelerated trials. There’s an enormous amount of work still to be done, but we are well on our way.
Alvea is led by Ethan Alley and Grigory Khimulya (Co-CEOs), Cate Hall, and Kyle Fish. Our team is growing rapidly, and we’re particularly keen to expand in the following areas:
- Wet laboratory (molecular biology, in vitro and in vivo development)
- Clinical trial operations and logistics
- General company operations
- cGMP manufacturing and quality
- Technical/scientific management
We’d love to hear from anyone who’s interested in dropping everything to get involved! Reach us at info@alveavax.com.
At present, it is basically impossible to advance any drug to market without extensive animal testing – certainly in the US, and I think everywhere else as well. The same applies to many other classes of biomedical intervention. A norm of EAs not doing animal testing basically blocks them from biomedical science and biotechnology; among other things, this would largely prevent them from making progress across large swathes of technical biosecurity.
This seems bad – the moral cost of failing to avert biocatastrophe, in my view, hugely outweigh the moral costs of animal testing. At the same time, speaking as a biologist who has spent a lot of time around (and on occasion conducting) animal testing, I do think that mainstream scientific culture around animal testing is deeply problematic, leading to large amounts of unnecessary suffering and a cavalier disregard for the welfare of sentient beings (not to mention a lot of pretty blatantly motivated argumentation). I don't want EAs to fall into that mindset, and the reactions to this comment (and their karma totals) somewhat concern me.
I wouldn't support a norm of EAs not doing animal testing. But I think I would support a norm of EAs approaching animal testing with much more solemnity, transparency, gratitude and regret than is normal in the life sciences. We need to remember at all times that we are dealing with living, feeling beings, who didn't & couldn't consent to be treated as we treat them, and who should be cared for and remembered. And we need to make sure we utilise animal testing as little as we can get away with, and make what testing we do use as painless as possible.
Finally, while I don't know everyone on the Alvea team personally, those I do know have a strong track record of deeply believing in, and living out, EA values around impartial concern for all sentient beings. I expect that if I had detailed knowledge of their animal testing decisions, I would believe they were necessary and the right thing to do. As an early test case on EAs in animal testing, I think it would be worth the Alvea team responding to this and developing a transparent policy around animal testing – but as a way to set a good example, not because I think there is reason to be suspicious of their decisions or motives.