So I had this old and dear friend, Norm, who will

So I had this old and dear friend, Norm, who will have been gone nearly ten years in a couple of weeks. Norm was a statistics junky, MIT as a teen etc, and once was in a ‘race’ with a Russian mathematician to solve an old problem ‘how many points exist on the line A....B’, which had applications in both statistics and optics. The solution did come to him one evening while he was lying in the bathtub...dancing in the air above his head. Anyway I was thinking about Norm last night and it occurred to me that he would have enjoyed going along with AE’s on their visit to EpiVax, box of peptides in hand, asking the question ‘which of these peptides are likely to generate an immune response to the covid 19 virus?’ EpiVax looks them over and says we think that these ‘thirty odd’ peptides have a chance to solve your problem. Who knows how they arrived at that conclusions but it sounds elegant.

30+ peptides is way more peptides than I can hold in my aging brain at one time, so let’s say they identified five...A,B,C,D,E. And AE’s next job is (to me) to see which peptide/peptides generate an immune response when added to covid 19 infected blood. Seems straightforward but it does beg the question...and I seem to remember Joe using the phrase ‘singly or in combination’ in a CC...just how many permutations of these peptides are we talking about? If singly, then there would appear to be five. If in combination, we could be talking about A+B A+C, A+D, A+E, A+F, B+C and so forth. And what if ‘in combination’ also means ‘combined with’, e.g., not just A+B but actually AB, or even ABE, or BCE, or ABCDE? And what if ‘in combination’ also implies some kind of ‘positional’ function, eg that the place of a peptide has when combined with another peptide creates a different outcome, eg BCE really does function differently from BEC?

It seems like it opens up so many more possibilities...like buying 500,000 lottery tickets each Friday night to improve your chances of winning...but does it?

Does anyone have any insight into these questions? Just what is AE really doing at this stage of its investigation? And is this why BARDA and CEPI are both in a ‘wait and see’ posture?