HEALTH CARE
Pedro Hernandez , a UC Davis research associate ( left ), and Duane Kim , a UC Davis medical student , conduct an experiment in Dr . Angela Haczku ’ s lab to stimulate airway epithelial cells , which protect the body against pathogens and are likely targeted by first became aware of it . The community-acquired case at UC Davis underlined the importance of the work that teams of researchers , faculty members , doctors and other specialists were already doing at the university to create a vaccine for COVID-19 . The process , complex in the best of times , was made more urgent by skyrocketing infection rates in early 2020 . Speed is certainly a necessity but so too are accuracy , safety and efficacy , and it ’ s up to the experts around the world to figure out how to balance the equation . The efforts of the UC Davis teams and those of the international science community have led to UC Davis ’ participation in a global clinical trial being run by Pfizer — one of the most promising vaccine trials to date . In fact , Pfizer and partner company BioNTech announced Nov . 9 that their vaccine candidate had proven 90 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 in trial participants who had no prior evidence of infection .
The making of a vaccine
Over the centuries , vaccines have become a critical piece of health care to protect populations from virulent diseases and , sometimes , even eradicate them . Their use can be traced back as far as 10th-century China , though the term “ vaccine ” wasn ’ t used until the late 1790s when English scientist Edward Jenner published his work with variola vaccinia ( cowpox ), which led to the first vaccine for human smallpox .
Though there are many types of vaccines , their fundamental mechanism is the same . By introducing a foreign agent into the body , a vaccine stimulates the immune system to recognize the threat and mount an attack , creating antibodies ( also known as immunoglobulins ) that destroy the intruder and remember it in case it returns . If a person is later infected with an actual pathogen , like a bacterium or virus , the body recognizes it from before and neutralizes the threat before the intruder can infect the body ’ s
30 comstocksmag . com | December 2020