CNRS has developed a vaccine against chinkungunya thanks to Oracle's cloud

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It all started with a dodecera ball, a twelve-sided geometric shape. From this toy and with a little imagination and advanced technology, the CNRS has managed to create the first vaccine against chikungunya that does not need to be refrigerated.

Chikungunya, a tropical disease transmitted by a virus through mosquito bites, is characterized by high fever and violent pain. The disease has two main foci, in Africa and Asia. "The problem is that there is a lot of mess with thermo-stable vaccines [whose cold chain must not be broken, ed] especially when they are sent to countries in sub-Saharan Africa. I am also thinking of Reunion, which has more recently suffered from a chikungunya pandemic in 2006 "says Imre Berger, director of the Max Planck Center for Minimal Biology in Bristol, UK and affiliated with the CNRS.

 "The same mosquitoes have started to appear in France because of global warming.The French government has decided to react and has launched research plans in this area." This is where the little dodecahedron-shaped ball of a colleague from Imre Berger comes into play. "Its shape really resembled that of a virus without being one." The team then emits the idea of ​​creating an adenovirus molecule, one of the most widespread virus families in the world. Its surface resembles the chikungunya virus, without containing the disease. "Thus, injected into the body, the body thinks it is chikungunya and then develops the corresponding antibodies."

Observe the movement of molecules

To create a vaccine, one must first know the structure of the protein responsible for the replication of the virus in the body and know how this infectious agent occurs. "To develop the basic structure, we used cryo-electron microscopy, which allows us to see the atomic structure of cells"explains Imre Berger of the CNRS. In concrete terms, the virus is diluted in water. Scientists take a drop of liquid, freeze it and vitrify it between two pieces of glass. "Placed under the microscope, this drop shows you 1000 different molecules.At each nanosecond, a photo is taken by the camera.This allows to observe the movement of molecules under heat.This represents a huge mass of data. Robust software processing has been necessary to understand the dynamics of the molecules and to remove the blur in the images. A mission that Oracle took charge of.

 "With electronic cryo-microscopy, terabytes of data are generated because they are video, and processing these data as we wanted requires complex and intensive calculations." Concretely, you have to succeed in producing 3D images from 2D files. "I do not understand anything about the cloud, what I needed was simple access to the data and to be able to use the interface without any problem." The program just had to look like the classic tools we have used to use, and actually it only took a fraction of a second to perform operations with a lot of data ", remembers Imre Berger.

A regulatory step has yet to be taken

As a result, the team has developed a custom-made vaccine without adjuvants, substances that activate and strengthen the immune system. And the vaccine can be stored at room temperature. Normally, vaccines should be refrigerated and kept in a fairly strict temperature range of 2 to 8 degrees, otherwise they may lose effectiveness. Below 2 degrees, cold and frost can destroy the properties of the vaccine. Above 8, the patient is at risk of getting infected by the disease after the injection.

 "Now, this disease that is excruciatingly painful and can be fatal, will be able to be contained", welcomes Imre Berger. However, now that the injection is developed, it requires further scientific studies to verify its safety before it can be approved and put on the market by the European Medicines Agency, which regulates this sector.

The hope of overcoming other diseases

If these searches are a victory against chikungunya, they are also a success for the cloud applied to research. "This project demonstrates the usefulness of fast cloud hardware, while IT is turning more and more to the cloud, but it also includes new possibilities, and it should not run out of steam over time. the number of data that is increasing and that it must be able to process in very large quantities "says Phil Bates, Cloud Innovation Architect at Oracle and Honorary Professor of Computational Science at the University of Bristol.

Other vaccines could now be developed with this new model, such as zika or dengue fever. "We believe we can target new diseases in humans such as influenza, the virus that causes influenza, or other animal diseases." A whole new range of vaccines will be able to see the day thanks to this method of conception. computer" explains Imre Berger. For the moment, no vaccine against chikungunya is available on the market. In 2010, the first two cases of chikungunya were reported in France. It's impossible to know exactly how many people suffer in the world. As an indication, more than 1,379,788 suspected cases of chikungunya had been registered in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States of America by WHO in 2015.

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