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This is: Making Vaccine, published by johnswentworth on LessWrong.

Back in December, I asked how hard it would be to make a vaccine for oneself. Several people pointed to radvac. It was a best-case scenario: an open-source vaccine design, made for self-experimenters, dead simple to make with readily-available materials, well-explained reasoning about the design, and with the name of one of the world’s more competent biologists (who I already knew of beforehand) stamped on the whitepaper. My girlfriend and I made a batch a week ago and took our first booster yesterday.

This post talks a bit about the process, a bit about our plan, and a bit about motivations. Bear in mind that we may have made mistakes - if something seems off, leave a comment.

The Process

All of the materials and equipment to make the vaccine cost us about $1000. We did not need any special licenses or anything like that. I do have a little wetlab experience from my undergrad days, but the skills required were pretty minimal.

One vial of custom peptide - that little pile of white powder at the bottom.

The large majority of the cost (about $850) was the peptides. These are the main active ingredients of the vaccine: short segments of proteins from the COVID virus. They’re all <25 amino acids, so far too small to have any likely function as proteins (for comparison, COVID’s spike protein has 1273 amino acids). They’re just meant to be recognized by the immune system: the immune system learns to recognize these sequences, and that’s what provides immunity.

Each of six peptides came in two vials of 4.5 mg each. These are the half we haven't dissolved; we keep them in the freezer as backups.

The peptides were custom synthesized. There are companies which synthesize any (short) peptide sequence you want - you can find dozens of them online. The cheapest options suffice for the vaccine - the peptides don’t need to be “purified” (this just means removing partial sequences), they don’t need any special modifications, and very small amounts suffice. The minimum order size from the company we used would have been sufficient for around 250 doses. We bought twice that much (9 mg of each peptide), because it only cost ~$50 extra to get 2x the peptides and extras are nice in case of mistakes.

The only unusual hiccup was an email about customs restrictions on COVID-related peptides. Apparently the company was not allowed to send us 9 mg in one vial, but could send us two vials of 4.5 mg each for each peptide. This didn’t require any effort on my part, other than saying “yes, two vials is fine, thankyou”. Kudos to their customer service for handling it.

Equipment - stir plate, beakers, microcentrifuge tubes, 10 and 50 mL vials, pipette (0.1-1 mL range), and pipette tips. It's all available on Amazon.

Other materials - these are sold as supplements. We also need such rare and costly ingredients as vinegar and deionized water. Also all available on Amazon.

Besides the peptides, all the other materials and equipment were on amazon, food grade, in quantities far larger than we are ever likely to use. Peptide synthesis and delivery was the slowest; everything else showed up within ~3 days of ordering (it’s amazon, after all).

The actual preparation process involves three main high-level steps:

Prepare solutions of each component - basically dissolve everything separately, then stick it in the freezer until it’s needed.

Circularize two of the peptides. Concretely, this means adding a few grains of activated charcoal to the tube and gently shaking it for three hours. Then, back in the freezer.

When it’s time for a batch, take everything out of the freezer and mix it together.

Prepping a batch mostly just involves pipetting things into a beaker on a stir plate, sometimes drop-by-drop.

Finally, a dose goes into a microcentrifuge tube....