Researchers Testing Do-It-Yourself COVID-19 Vaccine on Themselves

A group of researchers have formed the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC), developed their own do-it-yourself COVID-19 vaccine and begun testing the vaccine on themselves.

RaDVaC members come from a range of backgrounds and professions, but most of them are trained scientists and engineers. This expanding core group met through their associations with Harvard Medical School and HMS Professor George Church. The project was launched in the Boston area but is expanding steadily across the US and throughout the world.

RaDVaC’s mission is rapid development, testing, and public sharing of vaccine recipes that are simple enough to be produced and administered by individual citizen scientists and qualified healthcare professionals. The group of researchers has drawn on decades of scientific literature describing proven vaccine designs to develop, produce, and self-administer an intranasally delivered vaccine. RaDVaC members have designed, produced, and self-administered several progressive generations of nasal vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. Currently, over 20 of them have self-administered the vaccine which is made up of fragments (peptides) of the virus, similar to the ones already being used for hepatitis B and human papillomavirus.

The group has not filed any patents or other intellectual property protections, and all information on their vaccine designs, material procurement, production, self-administration, and testing are freely shared on their website. In addition to publicly releasing the results of our vaccine work, RaDVaC is working with other researchers to advance new kinds of testing to assess immunity. The group aims to motivate others around the world to build on their efforts, to share their research openly, and to deploy protective vaccines rapidly and safely.