Stanislav Vartanov, MS’ Post

View profile for Stanislav Vartanov, MS

Driving Global Clinical Trials | Leader & Consultant in Patient Recruitment, Retention & Engagement Excellence | Expert in Customer-Centric Clinical Innovation

Recently I was doing scientific analyze of different vaccines, for my own development, being curious about this part of medicine, i was not so much in throughout my career. And found quite interesting things about Pneumococcal infections and vaccines against them. May be it is obvious for professionals and experts in this area, but from the point of view of clinical trials it was interesting to discover (for myself, for sure) the trend. Main struggle against IPDs (invasive pneumococcal diseases) started 20-30 years ago, when pneumococcal polysaccharide conjugate vaccines (PCVs) were developed globally by several pharma companies (first PCVs were made much earlier in 70th like PCV4 but main struggle was started later). First it was quite a few amount of serotypes in PCVs, which was reflected in its numbering - PCV7, PCV13, PCV16 etc. But later closer to current days - several pharma companies already registered vaccines like PCV20, PCV21. Now there are several trials ongoing where the very progressive high-end vaccines are under research - PCV26 and even PCV31. And that is fantastic development. However, I need to say, that generally there are about 100 (!) wild serotypes of Pneumacoccal infections existing in nature. Quite a lot, and we only now meeting the 1/4 of all serotypes numbers in our vaccines. There are a lot of reasons why, reasons what serotypes are included into PVCs and how it goes. But returning back to my own conclusion i got from all that research I was doing, reading many articles, study details and analytical reviews - this is all the race against time! Cause earlier researches found interesting trend - invention of vaccines with higher index (meaning PCV20, PCV30 etc) doesnt lead to win of humanity over IPDs but just partial success, because nature IMMEDIATELY replaces part of the vaccine serotypes (VT) by non-vaccine serotypes (NVT) in the pattern of morbidity globally. Obviously that race against time (human, and their vaccines against nature with her ~100 serotypes) possibly will end when humanity invents smth like "PCV100". But the issue here is in technology: results of the complexity of conjugate vaccine manufacturing, because only a fraction of these are currently included in the pneumococcal polysaccharide conjugate vaccines. In other words - we cannot do "PCV100" now, until we find proper carrier or vector to create that "PCV100". I wish all the researchers and companies success in this area, because this is THE VERY important area of medicine and struggles against disease, which may be fatal in many cases. Especially nowadays, when we have antibiotic resistent strains of bacterias, resistent serotypes and etc. Anyway it is very interesting to follow this topic and see how pharma industry develops. And be inside, doing clinical trials as professional makes me proud, being in the very edge of science and healthcare! #vaccines #virology #pneumococcaldiseases #clinicaltrials #modernapproach #PCV #opentowork

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