 Hello and welcome to Top 10 Emerging Technologies, a show from the World Economic Forum where we're looking back at some of the most promising technologies from the past decade. I'm your host Alice Hazelton and in today's episode we'll be looking at genomic vaccines. To get us started, let's look at this video from Professor Robin Schattich from Imperial College London where he explains to us just exactly how genomic vaccines work. Now RNA vaccines work by identifying the coat surface of a pathogen, encoding it in the synthesized RNA and then that's injected into your muscle and the muscle makes the vaccine. So imagine your muscle becomes the factory that makes the vaccine that triggers your immune system to make protective white cells and antibodies. Now this technology offers four important advantages. First rapid response, then you can include multiple vaccines in the same technology even within the same shot, it has a low infrastructure cost and a low manufacturing footprint. So it's ideal for a distributed manufacturing network. Imagine a process that's really very reproducible, essentially it's synthesized RNA which is code made out of the same building blocks whether it's a vaccine against Ebola or Zika virus. This technology is not completely new, it's already being used successfully in the cancer field. So what we want to do is ensure that it can be used for outbreaks and pandemics. And here today to tell us more about genomic vaccines is Professor Robin Schattich himself. Hi Robin, thanks so much for joining us today. So vaccines are something that has been top of mind for so many of us over the past year but can you just remind us why vaccines are such an important public health tool? So I think it's important to remember why vaccines are so important as a public health tool. In fact next to clean water they've probably prevented more deaths than any other public health intervention. So they've been extremely successful and continue to be really the bedrock of preventing many diseases both in childhood diseases but also very recently in association with the current pandemic. So today we're talking about genomic vaccines specifically. But can you just tell us a little bit more about why are genomic vaccines so those that are made of DNA or RNA, why are they different to the vaccines that we are more traditionally used to that are made of proteins? I think that genomic vaccines or nucleic acid vaccines differ from previous approaches really because of their simplicity and that's because they can be manufactured through a pretty much a synthetic process certainly for the RNA based vaccines. And so it's a move away from having to grow viruses or make proteins in huge fermenters with animal products, human products. It means that they're much cleaner and more precise and essentially because they encode what you want the vaccine to be you're making the body do the heavy lifting rather than the manufacturing plant. And what do you see as the next five to ten years of genomic vaccines? I think there are some very interesting developments that we're likely to see. The first is that having seen that these vaccines have been so successful in a pandemic situation. It's also created some frustration that people haven't been able to access them as rapidly as they would like. And in some ways that's because it was an unexpected success. And I think we'll now see many governments around the world wanting to establish their own manufacturing capacity. And the potential of technology is that because you can manufacture in a relatively low footprint, you don't need a large manufacturing facility, it could move to a situation where there are many regional manufacturing centres that have the hardware and actually what becomes distributed is the software, the genetic code for the next pandemic pathogen or the next chronic target. And that may help to democratise access to vaccine technology. But the other thing that I think we'll see changes is the use of these genetic vaccines more and more in oncology because they can be produced at small doses. Also, the ability to perhaps target unmet needs that have not been economically feasible in the past. So I'm hoping it will revolutionise a lot of what we do. It's not a magic bullet. It won't replace all other types of vaccines. But it will have an important new role to play in public health. And are there any any challenges that the genomic vaccines bring? I mean, cold chains are one thing that we often hear about having to keep vaccines at low temperatures. Is that something that plays a role with genomic vaccines as well? So all the challenges with genomic vaccines, certainly there are. And in some ways, we've been caught off guard by their very rapid success. So one of the challenges is that there just isn't the experience with many manufacturers for making RNA or genomic vaccines. That needs to be changed. The cold chains to be changed. So at the moment, as you know, most of them need to be kept in very cold freezing storage. But many groups are working to change that. And I'm sure we'll see in very short order vaccines that are stable refrigerator temperature, even at room temperature. All of those things are achievable over time. So I think that will change. And then the final challenge is to reduce the cost. It's new technology. You know, the reagents aren't really available on a mass scale because they haven't been demanded on a mass scale. I'm sure that capacity will grow. And then that will bring down the costs and make them more affordable for lower and middle income countries. Robin, thank you so much for our conversation today. It's clear that there's a huge potential for genomic vaccines in the future. And I think we've learned a lot about the opportunities, but also about the challenges. So so thank you for joining us. Well, thank you. And it's been a pleasure to be involved. So we've heard today just how much progress has been made with genomic vaccines since they were first named one of the top ten emerging technologies in 2017. In fact, genomic vaccines have even been used this year to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only that, are they advantageous for future in terms of their speed, the fact that they can be produced locally and have the potential to be a lot cheaper than traditional vaccines. However, for this technology to progress even further into the future, issues surrounding cold chain storage and vaccine hesitancy will be top of mind for many people around the world to address. If you enjoyed today's episode, then please do join in the conversation on social media and we'll look forward to seeing you next time for the next episode of top ten emerging technologies.