Scientists look for pandemic hotspot in race to test vaccine

London / Chicago — The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic may be declining. For vaccine developers, that can be a problem.

Western scientists have found that in some regions and countries, where stringent regulations and social distance policies are relatively successful, viral infection rates are so low that true vaccines can be tested. It states that there may not be enough disease circulating.

To get convincing results, you may need to look further afield to pandemic African and Latin American hotspots.

“Ironically, testing vaccines can be difficult if you really succeed in using public health measures to eradicate viral infection hotspots,” said Francisco Linz, director of the National Institutes of Health. I will.

Vaccines are seen as essential to ending a pandemic that has killed nearly 370,000 people and infected more than 6 million people so far, and world leaders are the only ones to resume a stalled economy. We are considering vaccination as a realistic method of.

However, rapidly conducting large-scale clinical trials of potential vaccines against an entirely new disease is complex, scientists say. Efficacy in these trials during a fluctuating pandemic adds to the additional difficulty-in doing so when the outbreak is declining, it becomes even more difficult.

“In order for this to work, people have to risk being infected in the community. If the virus is temporarily cleared, the movement is meaningless.”

“The solution is to move to areas where the infection is widespread in the community-currently countries like Brazil and Mexico.”

Vaccine trials randomly divide people into treatment and control groups, with treatment group receiving trial vaccine and control group receiving placebo.

All participants will be returned to the community where the disease is circulating and their subsequent infection rates will be compared. It is expected that the infections in the control group will be higher and that the test vaccine will protect the other groups.

As the COVID-19 epidemic in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, and the United States has declined from peak coronavirus peaks and lower infection rates, an important task for scientists was to track variable outbreaks and Finding volunteers in some or sick countries is still widespread.

A similar problem arose during the massive 2014 pandemic in West Africa when scientists were trying to test the potential of a new vaccine against Ebola. Since then, pharmaceutical companies have been forced to significantly reduce their plans for large-scale trials. Because their vaccine was only ready for the trial at the end of the epidemic, where the number of cases was declining. https://reut.rs/36OmkVu

For interactive graphics tracking global spread, open https://tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7 in an external browser

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The trials in Phase 2, the first COVID-19 vaccine to move into the interim phase, were developed by US biotechnology company Moderna and by scientists at Oxford University supported by AstraZeneca. In July, the United States will begin testing efficacy in 20,000 to 30,000 volunteers per vaccine.

Collins said US health officials will first use the US government and industry clinical trials networks to use mappings to find where the virus is most active. In addition, if the incidence of domestic illness has dropped significantly, it will consider visiting overseas.

The US government has experience testing vaccines against HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis in Africa.

“In Africa, many cases of COVID-19 are starting to occur right now, and we might want to run some of the trials we know we can collect data on effectively,” Collins said. I am.

Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University in the UK, which has partnered with AstraZeneca, said it is aiming to hire about 10,000 people in the UK by launching midterm trials last month.

He told Reuters that the transmission rate of COVID-19 has fallen in the UK, and the trial may have to be discontinued if there weren’t enough infections to deliver results.

“It’s a shame, and unlikely at the moment, it’s certainly possible,” Hill said.

Challenge trial

Emphasizing the level of concern in the industry, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Sriott said the researchers were also considering conducting so-called “challenge” trials and told participants And confirmed whether it was effective by intentionally infecting COVID-19. .. Such tests are rare, high risk, and difficult to obtain ethical approval.

As a more practical and quicker option, Solio and colleagues have set up Brazil and other countries in South America, as well as parts of Africa, where COVID-19 outbreaks are still at their peak, as test centers for ripe drugs and vaccines. I am considering.

Difficulties in recruiting candidates for intermediate-stage vaccine trials in COVID-19 pandemic declining countries include infectious cases, including the World Health Organization’s potential treatment multilateral solidarity trials The generic drug hydroxychloroquine and Gilead’s lemdesibir may be foreseen by the experience of your doctor.

For example, in the Swiss part of the case, it took three weeks to get all the ethical and regulatory approvals from the authorities, and another week to get all the drugs, an infectious disease expert and solidarity. Oriole Manuel, the national coordinator of the study, said in Switzerland.

“We were able to enroll some patients in Lausanne (one trial center),” Manuel said. “But when all the centers were ready, the incident was fortunately gone.”

(Reports by Kate Kelland of London, Julie Steinheissen of Chicago, John Miller of Switzerland, edited by Carmel Crimines)