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Coronavirus COVID-19 Vaccine

Vaccines Against Novel Coronavirus May Take Months to Come

Sophia Yu

posted on February 21, 2020 11:27 am

Confirmed cases of the COVID-19 climbed to 76,497 around the world, of which 1,252 happened outside China as of Feb. 21 morning Beijing time. While cautioning the public, some expert do think that the number for coronavirus recovery cases overtook those who became ill for the first time is a good news.

To tackle the outbreak, global experts are in a rush to develop vaccines for the virus, which is very similar to the SARS and MERS viruses but still in a strain that was never seen before. Vaccine works by training the human immune systems to recognize and fight pathogens, often viruses or bacteria. 

Vaccines are divided into many types based on their different preparation process. There's live-attenuated vaccines, cultivated under conditions that disable their virulent properties, or are significantly less dangerous to the human body but can efficiently produce immune response. Another type is subunit, which is essentially a fragment of a virus but is capable of triggering a response.

In reality, the stages of vaccine development are not so neatly divided, but is generally divided into stages. These stages can often take around 2-5 years, with some vaccines taking up to 10 years to finish the process due to various reasons, including regulatory approval or failures.

  • Basic and applied research, as well as pilot production: during which public and private institutions work together to develop test units to be put into trials in later stages;
  • Clinical evaluation: experts test the vaccine in animals and then human in separate phases, looking at criteria such as its efficacy, potency and safety to be massively adopted on human, and prepare reports used in later stages;
  • Licensing: it is often the pharmaceutical companies that are making the vaccines in the end. They need to apply for regulatory approval to produce the vaccine from their drug safety authorities, including the U.S. FDA. This stage can take months, if not years for a vaccine targeting known infectious diseases, but may be cut short as needed when urgency happens, like the COVID-19 outbreak the world is experiencing now;
  • Scaling up production: the public would be celebrating in rejoice after the previous stages, but the pharmaceutical companies actually confronts one of the most challenging situation when they are green-lit for mass production. Messing up this stage may reduce the potency of the final product, or even give rise to safety risks not observed in previous stages.

In the end, it would have taken years for a vaccine to be delivered into human bodies. And it doesn't go as planned in some occasions. For example, a working vaccine for the SARS virus was never successfully developed, even 17 years after it caused an epidemic in 2003. There is no publicly available cure for SARS that infected 8,000 over the world. Vaccines for the MERS are also experimental ones and never made it to market.

The World Health Organization said on February 12 that it may take 18 months for a vaccine against the coronavirus to be publicly available, according to Reuters citing WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who then said the most important goal so far is to avoid stigma.

Nevertheless, as the novel coronavirus 2019 is a similar strain of coronavirus, scientists are revisiting previous development work for the SARS and MERS vaccines to accelerate the development process.

Dr. Doctor Paul McKay at Imperial College School of Medicine (ICSM) in London is working on a vaccine/PHOTO: New Strait Times
Dr. Doctor Paul McKay at Imperial College School of Medicine (ICSM) in London is working on a vaccine/PHOTO: New Strait Times

More than a dozen research teams and pharmaceutical companies in at least six countries including China, US, UK and Norway are ramping up efforts to develop a vaccines. The institutions involved include China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Medical School at Tongji University, Institute of Microbiology at Chinese Academy of Science, BravoVax, Moderna, Imperial College at London, University of Saskatchewan in Canada, US National Institute of Health, University of Queensland in Australia/GSK, Sanofi, Novavax Inc, Johnson & Johnson and many more.

Vaccines developed using recombinant DNA, RNA and protein, which is categorized as innovative new vaccine approaches, have been developed and are being tested in China and the UK, where animal trials have been conducted. No results were readily available.

An Oxford University Jenner Institute team, which have been working on a vaccine the MERS, is developing a vaccine for the virus, named ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. The team is in a contract with Italian pharmaceutical company AdventSrl to produce the first batch of vaccines. Professor Sarah Gilbert at the institute said the vaccine will be ready ‘within months,’ according to The Express.

A UK researcher team, led by Professor Robin Shattock from the Department of Infectious Disease at Imperial College Landon, has begun trials on animals on February. "We have the technology to develop a vaccine with a speed that’s never been realized before," said Prof. Shattock, adding that "If this work is successful, and if we secure further funding, the vaccine could enter into clinical studies (with human participants) in early Summer."

Epidemiologists and other experts currently don't have a consensus on when the epidemic will die down. Some claimed (link in Chinese) that the SARS-CoV-2, official name for the novel coronavirus, may stay with the human race for a long time and become a common, yet no less deadly, virus.