New Entry to the Coronavirus Vaccine Competition: Hope

In a medical research project that compares little to ambition and scope, volunteers around the world are rolling up their sleeves to receive an vaccine against the coronavirus-just a few months after the virus was identified.

Companies such as Inovio and Pfizer have begun early testing of candidates to determine if the vaccine is safe. Researchers at Oxford University in the UK are also testing a vaccine for humans, saying they can prepare an emergency vaccine in September.

The findings will pave the way for the development of human vaccines, researchers said. They are already affiliated with Johnson & Johnson, a division of Janssen.

Labs around the world now have a cautious optimism that coronavirus vaccines, and perhaps multiple vaccines, will be prepared sometime next year.

Scientists are looking for at least four approaches, not just one, to create a vaccine. The urgency is so high that we are combining test stages to shorten processes that typically take years, and sometimes 10 years or more.

Michael Ferzan, a virologist at Scripps Research in Jupiter, Florida, said:

Dr. Dan Baruch, a virologist at Beth Israel’s Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who led the monkey trial, said: “Thus, compressing the entire vaccine process from 12 months to 18 months is unheard of.”

“If that happens, this will be the fastest vaccine development program in history.”

Over 100 research teams around the world are aiming for viruses from various angles.

Moderna’s vaccine is based on a relatively new mRNA technology that delivers some of the viral genes to human cells. The goal is for cells to start making viral proteins that the immune system recognizes as foreign. The body builds defenses against that protein and attacks and attacks the body when the actual coronavirus invades.

Some vaccine manufacturers, including Inovio, are developing vaccines based on DNA variations of this approach.

However, it goes without saying that the technology used by both companies has never produced a vaccine approved for clinical use and can be produced in industrial quantities. Moderna was criticized for making rosy predictions based on a small number of patients without providing scientific data.

Other research teams turned to more traditional strategies.

Some scientists use harmless viruses to deliver coronavirus genes to cells, forcing them to produce proteins that tell the immune system to be wary of coronaviruses. CanSino Biologics, a Chinese company, has begun human testing of a coronavirus vaccine that relies on this approach, as has its team at Oxford University.

Other conventional approaches rely on fragments of coronavirus proteins to make vaccines, but some uses use killed or inactivated versions of the entire coronavirus. In China, such vaccines have already taken part in human trials.

Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Ikern School of Medicine on Mount Sinai in New York, predicts that 20 more vaccine candidates will enter clinical trials over the next 20 weeks.

“I’m not worried about it at all,” he said about the prospects for a new vaccine.

Many of these vaccines stumble as the trial progresses. As more people are inoculated, some candidates will fail to protect against the virus and side effects will become more apparent.

But given that scientists are learning about coronaviruses, it should be a relatively simple target.

Coronavirus sports an attractive target on its surface, a unique “spike” protein that pathogens need to enter human cells. The immune system easily learns to recognize these proteins, emerges, attacks them and kills the virus.

Viruses challenge vaccine makers by rapidly mutating and changing shape, preventing antibodies that work in one strain from working in another. Thankfully, The new coronavirus looks like a slow mutatorAnd, a vaccine that has been found to be effective in trials should work anywhere in the world.

When research on coronavirus vaccines began, some researchers worried that antibodies might actually exacerbate the disease caused by coronavirus, Covid-19. However, early studies did not present a serious risk.

“It doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but I’m cautiously optimistic about that, as there are no signs so far,” said Dr. Allison Kelvin, a researcher at the Canadian Vaccine Institute. Dalhousie University.

Scale up

Ensuring that vaccines are safe and effective requires extensive trials that require careful planning and implementation. If those trials yield successful vaccines, someone will have to make them terribly a lot.

Nearly everyone on earth is vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Each person may need two new vaccines to get protective immunity. That is 16 billion doses.

“I don’t know what stage companies are talking about when they promise to deliver the vaccine within a year,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiologist at Yale University, said. “I think they are talking about the global distribution at billions of doses.

Manufacturing vaccines is much more complicated than manufacturing shoes and bicycles. Vaccines usually require large vats on which their ingredients are grown, which must be kept sterile. Also, no plant has released millions of approved vaccines made with cutting-edge technology being tested by companies such as Inovio and Moderna.

In recent years, the number of facilities producing viral vector vaccines, including the Johnson & Johnson factory in the Netherlands, has increased dramatically. However, meeting the demands of a pandemic is a daunting task. This type may be the easiest to mass produce, as manufacturers have the most experience with mass produced killed vaccines made with killed virus.

But there is more than one vaccine. If that happens, the company that created it has no chance to meet world demand.

“The expectations are that at some level everything is effective, and certainly it’s important,” said Emilio Emini, director of the Vaccine Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. support.

As part of a public-private partnership that the White House calls Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration will design a type of parallel manufacturing truck that runs in parallel with clinical trials and build sufficient capacity before the trials are complete. Promised. It can be distributed as soon as more vaccines are approved.

President Trump said Friday that the project’s goal is to deliver the vaccine “by the end of the year.” To that end, Trump relies on the Department of Defense to manage manufacturing logistics associated with vaccine development.

However, in a Thursday interview, Brigadier General Gustave F. Perna, who manages manufacturing logistics, said the debate on the equipment and equipment needed for production has just begun.

He described his study as a “mathematical problem.” It’s a way to get 300 million doses of vaccine by January, which Americans don’t have yet.

“How do you distribute it now? What is distributed? What do I need to order now to make sure it has a distribution feature? Small bottles, trucks.”

Dr. Ameja Adalja, an infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Safety Center, said minor glimpse aspects of production and distribution could complicate later progress.

“This is the scale we have never seen since the polio vaccine,” he said. “It’s small things like syringes, needles, glass bottles. You have to consider all that. You don’t want something as simple as a bottleneck in your vaccination program.”

The coronavirus vaccine does not yet exist, but there is already doubt about who can buy it.

Last week, Oxfam organized an open letter from 140 world leaders and experts calling for “a vaccine for people.” This means “making it available to all people in all countries free of charge.”

“These vaccines must be a public good,” said Helen Clark, New Zealand’s former prime minister who signed the open letter. “We are not safe until everyone is safe.”

Sui-Lee Wee contributed the report from Singapore.