One expert in the field, Margaret Ackerman, an assistant professor of engineering at Thayer School of Engineering, agrees. Formerly, she says, vaccine production “was a very simple approach. You attenuated or killed the pathogen, and that was your vaccine. When that worked as a vaccine it was great, but when it didn’t, it was hard to know where to go next.”
Now, she tells the magazine, a new approach has emerged. “Using protein engineering tools, we can look at a million or a billion variants of an antigen and pull out variants that we think would make a better vaccine.”
Read the full story, published 6/12/13 by NewScientist.