For this Rose Cafe GRF Tyler Moeller discussed how he was working on understanding and building new vaccines. I think a lot of people don’t understand how difficult, time consuming, and the amount of money required to develop a new vaccine. I think it is interesting (and perhaps a bit sad) that at least in the lab Tyler works in, an easy way to obtain funding for research is through the Defense Department’s fear of a biological weapon.

The complexity in which the human immune system works was amazing to learn about, and we only had a very basic overview of the entire biological mechanism. Most mechanisms in biology, like Protein synthesis or the body’s stress response, have so many “moving” parts. From a knowledge standpoint this makes it hard to fully understand how these mechanisms work in the first place. But from an engineering standpoint, these essentially over-engineered systems proved multiple access points from which we can alter and modify. Finally, we are beginning to know enough about how biological systems, such as the immune response, work mechanistically. Now we can start to move forward by engineering solutions to problems like diseases which we could only hope to treat symptoms, never fix at the source. Biomedical engineering is hopefully going to take us into the future.