this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Yeah, getting yeast to manufacture vaccines would go a long way to making them accessible. Especially if successive generations also produce the vaccine. Probably lots of testing left to do and definitely better watch out in case it disrupts vaccine makers profits. I really hate corporate feudalism
The difficulty I see here is that it took the yeast not very long to mutate a beneficial effect, but it could just as quickly mutate away from that and even mutate something harmful.
The biggest cost factor for classical pharma is QA. Both in the form of certifications before release and in the form of regular QA during production.
So skipping QA can of course bring the cost down massively, but with the cost of making a potentially very dangerous product.
It's possible I missed it, but I didn't see where it said how they came up with this strain of yeast. I was kind of assuming they used CRISPR or some other kind of gene editing to make it.
Regardless of if it was edited or selective breeding and random mutation, I do share those same concerns about how fast it might mutate and lose its effectiveness.
As far as it mutating into something harmful, sure it's a possibility, but the same possibility technically exists with any strain of yeast out there in the world, untold millions of generations of yeast have lived, mutated, reproduced, and died in breweries, bakeries, and vineyards since humans first started brewing beer and baking bread, and it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. It's certainly worth being cautious about, and I'm certainly no geneticist to make an educated statement about it, but I suspect it's probably a pretty low likelihood.
The reason why I thought about harmful mutations in this context is because this strain of yeast has some kind of property that activates the immune system, otherwise the whole concept wouldn't work.
That's not something regular yeast does, so for regular yeast to evolve something like that, that's a major step in evolution that doesn't happen quickly.
But modifying the immune system activating payload is much less difficult.
Due to the Hoskins effect, it's possible that an immune system trained for a "somewhat wrong" pathogen can perform worse than one that hasn't seen that kind of pathogen at all before. So if the payload of the yeast mutates, it can "mistrain" the immune system so that it then performs worse on the real-life pathogen.
That seems unlikely. The entire way it works is the yeast produces proteins that "look" like a virus to the immune system, causing a immune response. However that's the only part of of the virus in the yeast, there's nothing else that completes the virus. It's like... a steering wheel without a car, no matter how hard I mime swerving to run over a pedestrian nothing's gonna happen, because there is no car.
If the viral protein mutated it'd either A) still be recognized as a viral protein and generate immunity for a virus that doesn't exist, or B) generate a non-functional protein that the body would simply digest.
The version A) is a big issue actually, thanks to the Hoskins effect.
That means that if the immune system is trained for a slightly wrong type of pathogen, it might have a worse immune response to the actual pathogen at hand than if it wasn't trained at all.
So if that viral protein would mutate a bit, so that it's still recognized as viral protein by the immune system, it might cause the immune response to the actual virus to be worse instead of improving it.