A synthetic vaccine is a vaccine consisting mainly of synthetic

peptides Peptides (, ) are short chains of amino acids linked by peptide bonds. Long chains of amino acids are called proteins. Chains of fewer than twenty amino acids are called oligopeptides, and include dipeptides, tripeptides, and tetrapeptides. A p ...

, carbohydrates, or antigens. They are usually considered to be safer than vaccines from bacterial cultures. Creating vaccines synthetically has the ability to increase the speed of production. This is especially important in the event of a pandemic.

History

The world's first synthetic vaccine was created in 1796 from diphtheria toxin by

Louis Chedid (scientist) Louis Chedid (born 1 January 1948, in Ismaïlia) is a French singer-songwriter of Lebanese and Egyptian origin. Biography Louis Chedid is the son of the writer Andrée Chedid and the father of Matthieu Chedid (better known as -M-). As a child ...

from the Pasteur Institute and

Michael Sela Michael Sela ( he, מיכאל סלע; Mieczysław Salomonowicz; 2 March 1924 – 27 May 2022) was an Israeli immunologist of Polish Jewish origin. He was the W. Garfield Weston Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Reho ...

from the

Weizmann Institute The Weizmann Institute of Science ( he, מכון ויצמן למדע ''Machon Vaitzman LeMada'') is a public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, 14 years before the State of Israel. It differs from other Israeli un ...

. In 1986, Manuel Elkin Patarroyo created the SPf66, the first version of a synthetic vaccine for Malaria. During the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, vaccines only became available in large quantities after the peak of human infections. This was a learning experience for vaccination companies. Novartis Vaccine and Diagnostics, among other companies, developed a synthetic approach that very rapidly generates vaccine viruses from sequence data in order to be able to administer vaccinations early in the pandemic outbreak. Philip Dormatizer, the leader of viral vaccine research at Novartis, says they have "developed a way of chemically synthesizing virus genomes and growing them in tissue culture cells". Phase I data of UB-311, a synthetic peptide vaccine targeting amyloid beta, showed that the drug was able to generate antibodies to specific amyloid beta