Dr. Richard Moulange

speaker

1,784 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 31 Mar

Dr. Richard Moulange’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

80,000 Hours Podcast · #241 – Richard Moulange on how now AI codes viable genomes from scratch and outperforms virologists at lab work — what could go wrong? · 31 Mar 2026 podcast

There are a flurry of papers very recently.

It seems the sort of thing was just a sort of pipe dream 10 years ago.

But now there are multi-strain vaccines in phase two, I think even one in a phase three trial that are promising.

They're not all quite working yet, but it is no longer just a sort of preclinical pipe dream.

It's something now that is ready and investable.

Yeah, so you can either teach the human immune system to have lots of, yeah, you put in lots of bits of virus across the whole family at once.

So it learns just to know about lots of different viruses.

This is closer to sort of giving many vaccines in one go.

Or you look for some shared part of all the viruses.

There's a reason that all the pox viruses are called pox viruses because they have some conserved heritable parts of their sequence that make them identifiable as pox viruses versus influenza or something else.

We were, but often it is very hard to target some of the most conserved areas.

Often the most reactive bits of the virus might be the bits that are mutating fastest.

Think about in coronavirus, you see that sort of famous picture of a sphere and all these spikes.

It is the spike that you often target because it's outward facing, but it's also the spike that mutates the most because evolutionary for the virus, it wants to mutate.

So it can keep infecting things as immune systems adapt to the previous iteration of the spike.

So it is this like running game sometimes called Red Queen where, you know, there's an offense-defense balance again and we have to keep running to keep up.

But without being a sort of deep expert, I am not a vaccinologist.

I am assured by people who are that finally it is getting promising.

I don't deeply know about this.

I think there's also other ways where you're thinking more about what products could you use to teach the human immune system, often the innate part of the human immune system, to just recognize viruses in general.

Showing 1181–1200 of 1,784 · page 60 of 90