[Link] Sarah Constantin on RaDVaC

A couple of minor quibbles:

1. The peptides did not "come from in silico studies"; they came from the antibody profiles of real patients, who really had covid, and really recovered from covid (ideally without having a Bad Time during recovery.)  So there's more than just computational reasons to believe they will be useful.
2. It's questionable to complain that radvac did not have a single "research study using any of the peptides in the RADVAC white paper that found they inhibited SARS-CoV-2 infection in cells, let alone animals or humans", when the pfizer vaccine (which we know works) was designed via the same process a year ago, when we had even less information about effectiveness.

It looks like her objection is that the RaDVaC folks chose some pretty questionable peptides. Presumably you could simply order some different peptides, but I think you'll run into the following problems:

• You need to pick peptides that will, in the RaDVaC formulation, wind up folded similarly to their conformation in the live virus. I, personally, have no idea how to do that.
• You don't really have much evidence of immunogenicity for your new RaDVaC formulation and probably need to measure it again (my understanding is that the RaDVaC designers have done some immunogenicity measures in themselves, so the current formulation has some evidence of immunogenicity).