Thank you so much for your hard work, frank announcement, and detailed retrospectives!
One thing I’m curious about as a layman: Does your vaccine work?
If I understand your posts correctly[1], the claim from the Phase 1 trial is that it doesn’t increase antibodies (an intermediate proxy for increased immunity) more than the J&J vaccine comparator. However, I still don’t know which of the following hypotheses are true:
Your vaccine works (in the sense of conferring partial immunity to ongoing variants of SARS-COV-2), but its effectiveness level is not statistically distinguishable from J&J and other existing vaccines, so not worth further R&D in.
Your vaccine does not confer immunity.
For example, have you done followup checkins to compare the treatment group’s rate of infection to the control group?
Secondly, was the result of your vaccine trial an expected outcome?
eg, going in, was the team’s opinion more like
“we think in most worlds this vaccine won’t work, but we wanted to make a low-proabbility high-upside bid in a novel product?” or was it more like:
“we think this vaccine probably will work, and we’d be sad if it doesn’t?”
While I hate to “punish” your level of transparency by demanding more answers, I think understanding your internal models, levels of surprise, and how the team internally thought about setbacks and pivots can be useful for future EA organizations attempting similar ambitious real-world projects.
Anyway, thank you again for your hard work and detailed reflections!
So far, I’ve read your retrospective, the official announcement, Kyle Fish’s reflection, and the linked Google Doc preprint. I haven’t read anything else about Alvea, please feel free to let me know if I’m missing any key links.
Thank you so much for your hard work, frank announcement, and detailed retrospectives!
One thing I’m curious about as a layman: Does your vaccine work?
If I understand your posts correctly[1], the claim from the Phase 1 trial is that it doesn’t increase antibodies (an intermediate proxy for increased immunity) more than the J&J vaccine comparator. However, I still don’t know which of the following hypotheses are true:
Your vaccine works (in the sense of conferring partial immunity to ongoing variants of SARS-COV-2), but its effectiveness level is not statistically distinguishable from J&J and other existing vaccines, so not worth further R&D in.
Your vaccine does not confer immunity.
For example, have you done followup checkins to compare the treatment group’s rate of infection to the control group?
Secondly, was the result of your vaccine trial an expected outcome?
eg, going in, was the team’s opinion more like
“we think in most worlds this vaccine won’t work, but we wanted to make a low-proabbility high-upside bid in a novel product?” or was it more like:
“we think this vaccine probably will work, and we’d be sad if it doesn’t?”
While I hate to “punish” your level of transparency by demanding more answers, I think understanding your internal models, levels of surprise, and how the team internally thought about setbacks and pivots can be useful for future EA organizations attempting similar ambitious real-world projects.
Anyway, thank you again for your hard work and detailed reflections!
So far, I’ve read your retrospective, the official announcement, Kyle Fish’s reflection, and the linked Google Doc preprint. I haven’t read anything else about Alvea, please feel free to let me know if I’m missing any key links.