Dr. Preston Estep, Radvac’s Chief Scientist, published “Modernizing Variolation” on Substack, a personal and scientific reflection on the urgent need for medical countermeasures that can be developed, evaluated, and accessed on outbreak timelines. Dr. Estep argues that while vaccines remain an indispensable tool for biosecurity, conventional development and approval pathways often cannot deliver protection quickly enough during a fast-moving outbreak—especially one involving a novel, highly virulent, or engineered pathogen.
His essay revisits the historical roots of variolation as a precursor to vaccination and asks what lessons, if any, might be responsibly adapted using modern tools: pathogen inactivation, mucosal delivery, immune profiling, and rapid protocol iteration. As Radvac, we are pursuing this as part of a broader biosecurity research agenda: expanding the range of accessible biomedical countermeasures that could help communities respond when current conventional biosecurity mechanisms are too slow, unavailable, or mismatched to the pathogen in circulation.