Category: Corona Virus Vaccine

While many scientists are working on developing a coronavirus vaccine, others are busy testing antiviral drugs.

Vaccines are generally only effective when administered prior to infection, but antiviral agents are important because they can treat people who already have COVID-19.

Heres an overview of antiviral drugs scientists are investigating for coronavirus.

Read more: How does coronavirus kill?

How do antiviral drugs work? First, its important to understand the genome of animals and plants is composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), but viral genomes can also be comprised of ribonucleic acid (RNA). This is the case for SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the virus that causes COVID-19.

In order to replicate, an RNA virus needs to make more copies of its RNA genome. This means antiviral drugs which block the copying of RNA genomes can potentially help treat COVID-19 patients. These drugs are known as RNA-polymerase inhibitors.

Read more: Here's why the WHO says a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months away

These types of drugs have successfully cured people of chronic hepatitis C another RNA virus infection.

But not all viral RNA polymerases are the same, so the drugs that work for hepatitis C virus will not necessarily work for human coronaviruses.

Favilavir is an RNA polymerase inhibitor drug scientists are currently trialling against coronavirus.

Another successful antiviral drug strategy is to use non-functional analogues, or inauthentic copies of the basic building blocks of the viral RNA genome. The presence of these analogues in the viral genome blocks the viral polymerase, meaning the virus cannot make another copy of its RNA. Acyclovir, ribavirin and azidothymidine (AZT) are examples of these drugs.

Unfortunately, this coronavirus is a bit tricky, because it proofreads the authenticity of its RNA genome. As such, it identifies the analogues as being inauthentic and removes them. This stops certain antiviral drugs like ribavirin from being effective.

Fortunately, the coronavirus proofreading powers dont block a similar drug, remdesivir. So remdesivir potently halts coronavirus replication and represents a promising drug option for COVID-19 patients.

Remdesivir is also effective against other RNA viruses including Ebola virus and the coronaviruses SARS and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS).

Scientists are currently assessing remdesivir in clinical trials in the United States and China. Time will tell if remdesivir is effective for COVID-19 patients. But doctors are already considering how the drug is best administered for optimal results and whether it should be used in combination with other drugs or as a single agent.

Read more: COVID-19 treatment might already exist in old drugs we're using pieces of the coronavirus itself to find them

Many RNA viruses produce a single multi-protein thats later broken down into individual proteins via enzymes called proteases. Any molecules that inhibit these proteases have potential as antiviral drugs. Viral protease inhibitor drugs have been highly effective in treating the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis C virus.

Lopinavir and ritonavir are a combination protease-inhibitor drug (Kaletra) that can inhibit coronaviruses in human cells. Kaletra has already been used to treat a patient with COVID-19 in South Korea, but a larger trial found its effects were unconvincing. The reasons for these discrepancies are currently unclear and more research is obviously needed.

With any antiviral drug, the sooner its administered once a patient is infected, the better the outcome. This is because viruses replicate quickly, producing tens to hundreds of new infectious viruses.

In respiratory infections caused by influenza or SARS-CoV-2 viruses, clinically serious infection involves whats called a cytokine storm. Here, a strong immune response results in the production of high levels of inflammatory mediators: cytokines and chemokines.

These molecules recruit inflammatory cells to the site of the virus infection, for example, the lungs of patients with COVID-19. These cytokines and cells then fight the virus infection, but their presence also partly obstructs the air sacs where oxygen exchange occurs.

Researchers are now considering add-on therapies that partly limit the inflammatory response by blocking the effects of certain cytokines and chemokines. These add-on therapies include antibody-based drugs, such as tocilizumab that blocks the interleukin-6 cytokine receptor or leronlimab that blocks the chemokine receptor CCR5. When cytokine receptors and chemokine receptors are blocked then it matters less that there are high levels of cytokines or chemokines, because their effects are significantly minimised.

The good news is antibody-based drugs have minimal side effects, and have proved effective for many human chronic inflammatory diseases. Expanding these drugs for use in COVID-19 patients is therefore an attractive possibility. Although this would require caution for careful dosing, and these drugs would need to be co-administered together with an antiviral drug.

Chloroquine, a well-known anti-malarial drug, has also gained attention. One study tested it together with a broad-spectrum antibiotic azithromycin. While some COVID-19 patients in this small study recovered, other patients died (despite chloroquine treatment), and some patients ceased treatment for a variety of reasons including the severity of their symptoms.

Nevertheless, people are interested in how chloroquine and azithromycin might work for coronavirus. Chloroquine exhibits antiviral activity and is currently used to treat autoimmune diseases because it also has anti-inflammatory properties. Azithromycin is an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections, but it, too, exhibits antiviral activity, including against rhinovirus that causes the common cold. Chloroquine might need to be given early after infection to be most effective against coronavirus.

Read more: Could chloroquine treat coronavirus? 5 questions answered about a promising, problematic and unproven use for an antimalarial drug

The World Health Organisation has announced a global clinical trial program testing possible COVID-19 treatments, including remdesivir, lopinavir/ritonavir, chloroquine, and certain antiviral cytokines.

The escalating number of coronavirus patients worldwide means alongside vaccine development, the focus must remain squarely on finding effective antiviral drugs that can treat those already seriously ill from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

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In the fight against coronavirus, antivirals are as important as a vaccine. Here's where the science is up to - The Conversation AU

Johnson & Johnson says it could have a COVID-19 vaccine available by early 2021 with the capability to produce as many as a billion doses. In a press release, the company says its planning to start clinical trials in September and has begun investing in a rapid production capability to make the vaccine at scale should it prove safe and effective. Johnson & Johnson began work on a possible vaccine in January and has now selected a lead candidate vaccine and two backups which will enter early production phases to prepare for the expected overwhelming demand. If early trials validate the companys vaccine, the company would need an emergency use authorization from the FDA to begin providing the vaccine.

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Johnson & Johnson Says It Could Have Coronavirus Vaccine Ready by Early 2021 - The Daily Beast

The race to stop the fast-spreading coronavirus is on. Its going to be a long road to safe and effective treatment, but pharmaceutical companies and research facilities are exploring a variety of therapeutics to find a way to combat the virus.

Pharmaceutical companies are studying drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration to see if any might work in fighting COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Simultaneously, companies are in the process of developing vaccines for the virus that can be deployed to protect the uninfected population.

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Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

Repurposed drugs could be a faster route to an effective treatment, but they would still need to go through clinical testing to ensure their effectiveness. Malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and Ebola antiviral remdesivir are being tested in small batches of infected patients. Even with promising results, its unclear at this time whether any of these treatments will be successful in the larger population.

A vaccine tailored to combat the virus is the long-term solution. But according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the earliest a coronavirus vaccine would be deployable would be a year to 18 months from now. Any vaccine would have to go through three phases of clinical trials and then apply for approval by the FDA.

Johnson & Johnson in a partnership with Janssen Pharmaceuticals identified a lead vaccine candidate. They expect to initiate human clinical trials by September and the first batches could be available for emergency use in 2021.

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NBC News compiled a list of some of the potential treatments and where they stand in development. This work is ongoing and will be updated as time goes on and more pharmaceutical companies jump in to do their part to find a way to combat the virus.

Emily Siegel is an associate producer with the NBC News Investigative Unit.

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Tracking the development of coronavirus treatments - NBC News

As the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 virus continues, with countries facing lockdowns and hospitals dealing with unprecedented demand, a research team at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering is working around the clock on a new vaccine, the school announced Saturday.

The team is also looking at isolating the human antibodies that can successfully fight the viral infection in order to create working therapeutic treatments to improve recovery times for COVID-19 patients, according to researchers.

The research is led by Prof. Pin Wang, Zohrab A. Kaprielian Fellow in Engineering and Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Biomedical Engineering. Wang's lab specializes in the emerging field of immunobioengineering, which uses engineering tools to better understand the immune system and develop novel molecular and cellular immunotherapies.

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To create the vaccine, Wang and his team have engineered a hybrid virus, the core of which is based on that of the vesicular stomatitis virus; a family of viruses which includes rabies among others. The surface of the hybrid virus is then covered with spike proteins derived from the COVID-19 virus.

"The reason that this hybrid virus can be a good vaccine format is that by having the COVID-19 surface protein, this can hopefully trick our immune system into recognizing it," Wang said. "That way we can induce the neutralizing antibody to stop the virus from infecting us in future."

Wang said the team is "hoping we'll have a very potent product compared to other vaccine platforms."

This type of vaccine is known as a vectored vaccine and does not contain the harmful components of original viruses, and thus has safety benefits as opposed to vaccine forms using live-attenuated viruses, he said.

Wang said the vaccine research was also looking into ways in which cells' immune response works to combat the virus so that this process can be replicated in the development of therapeutics to manage COVID-19.

"If we can immunize animals like mice, then we can isolate the B cells that can generate antibodies; antibodies that can neutralize the virus," Wang said.

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USC Working on Coronavirus Vaccine, Researchers Announce - NBC Southern California

For biotechnology companies, responding to a sudden public health crisis, like the coronavirus, can be risky business. It can take more than a year to develop a vaccine or treatment. By that time, the threat may be gone, leaving little or no demand for a drug.

The current coronavirus pandemic appears to be different.

The race to beat the pathogen is on, with many biotechs now expecting a large market for coronavirus therapies in 2021 or beyond.But the starting gun didn't fire right away when the virus began spreading late last year.

"There were a lot of companies that kind of felt once bitten, twice shy," saidJose Trevejo, chief executive of SmartPharm Therapeutics in Kendall Square.

Companies were shy because drug makers have been bitten in the past when they've hustled to confront an outbreak, only to see the danger subside and their efforts go to waste. That's what happened during a previous coronavirus scare the SARS outbreak of 2003, which ended before any vaccine maker could earn a buck.

"There was also Ebola, and then a lot of people forget about the swine flu the H1N1," Trevejo said. "So, I think a lot of big pharma were a bit hesitant to plunge fully into coronavirus."

In recent weeks, the industry's view has changed. At LabCentral, the shared workspace where Trevejo's gene therapy startup operates, more than a dozen companies have turned their attention to the coronavirus, including SmartPharm.

And that's just one lab in Cambridge.

The number of companies pursuing coronavirus drugs is constantly growing, according to Yasmeen Rahimi, co-head of biotechnology research at Roth Capital Partners, an investment banking firm in Newport Beach, Calif.

"I track COVID-19 on a daily basis," she said. "Almost every day we get 10 or 12 companies that are coming."

Rahimi said the most notable may be Moderna, another Cambridge biotech. It's the first company to begin testing a potential coronavirus vaccine on humans in the U.S.

Moderna didn't respond to an interview request. But in a public document this week, the company said that "a commercially-available vaccine is not likely to be available for at least 12-18 months."

Moderna doesn't think the virus will peter out by then. Instead, it is "scaling up manufacturing capacity toward the production of millions of doses per month."

That may not be enough, according to Dr. Lee Wetzler, an infectious disease specialist at Boston Medical Center.

"Just like the flu vaccine, you're talking not just millions of doses," said Wetzler, who is also a professor at Boston University School of Medicine. "Tens tens of millions of doses and even more."

Then again, Wetzler added, it's hard to predict what this previously unknown virus will look like a year from now. It's possible that the pandemic will be under control, which would be good for the world but maybe not so good for companies, like Moderna and others, investing in drugs to stop it.

There's a cautionary tale in theonce-hot biotech Vical, which received federal money to chase vaccines for anthrax, SARS and Ebola. The fear and the funding always faded before Vical could cross the finish line, said John Carroll, editor of Endpoints News, a biotech publication.

"What Vical did was just flame out," he said. "They weren't able to come up with a vaccine and, after repeated failures, they just couldn't make it anymore."

The risk of failure is well understood by James Sietstra, chief business officer of Totient, one of the startups at LabCentral that have shifted to the coronavirus. But he maintains that working on the coronavirus won't be futile, even if the disease runs its course before Totient can bring a drug to market.

"As a business case for us, this is a great proof point for the power of our platform," he said.

Sietstra said the same method Totient will use to attack the coronavirus could also be used against other diseases including the company's original target, cancer.

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Vaccine Development Is Risky Business. Biotechs Are Tackling The Coronavirus, Anyway - WBUR

COVID-19 is new and scientists understand little about how it behaves and spreads. The cost of creating a vaccine to protect people against the new coronavirus will run into billions of dollars and could take many months. Here are some of the reasons why.

Technology is enabling new methods of exploring vaccine candidates for trial, but there are already a few tried and tested ways to make them.

In all of them, scientists try to stimulate the bodys immune system to combat invasive pathogens. Thats commonly done by creating something so similar to the pathogen that the body begins to create antibodies to fight off the real thing.

The most common way of doing this is to make whats called attenuated vaccines those that are made of weaker strains of the actual pathogen. Reared on animal cells outside of human bodies (some flu vaccines are cultured on chicken eggs), they are then extracted and injected in a single tiny dose.

Vaccines for measles and tuberculosis are created in this way.

The number of US adults who would be vaccinated against COVID-19 grew between February and March.

Image: Statista

Inactivated vaccines, on the other hand, are derived from identifying the active proteins in a virus that enables them to invade human cells. Thats done by taking dead samples of the pathogen and studying their genetic make-up so that scientists can replicate them en masse. When injected into a human, the body gets to work again constructing the necessary antibodies.

Often such vaccines require multiple doses over time, including those to protect against such diseases as rabies and polio.

Then there are nucleotide-based vaccines, which seek to replicate the genetic material DNA and RNA of a virus. This method stimulates the bodys own creation of this viral material in order for it to produce the necessary antibodies.

A DNA-based vaccine for Zika virus, which was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization in 2016, was ready for clinical trials seven months after it was designed, but that is unusual.

There are already at least 35 companies and academic institutions racing to make a COVID-19 vaccine, with at least four candidates in the animal-testing phase. And one will enter human trials soon. But thats just one hurdle cleared.

As Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US, said: A vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine thats deployable. [It will take] a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go.

Vaccines must be rigorously tested to ensure they not only work but will not cause other dangerous side-effects.

The trial methodology consists of three phases:

1. Testing on a small number of healthy adults

2. Testing on a larger number of adults in an area where the disease has spread

3.Testing on thousands of people in an area where the disease has spread

Each of these steps can last between six and eight months, but even if the vaccine candidate gets that far many are abandoned or fail before then they must then be studied by regulators before approval is granted.

Constricting the whole timeline of going from concept to a product that can be distributed into a year or two is really a herculean endeavour, said Jon Andrus, an adjunct professor of global vaccinology and vaccine policy at the Milken Institute of Public Health at George Washington University.

A new strain of Coronavirus, COVID 19, is spreading around the world, causing deaths and major disruption to the global economy.

Responding to this crisis requires global cooperation among governments, international organizations and the business community, which is at the centre of the World Economic Forums mission as the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.

The Forum has created the COVID Action Platform, a global platform to convene the business community for collective action, protect peoples livelihoods and facilitate business continuity, and mobilize support for the COVID-19 response. The platform is created with the support of the World Health Organization and is open to all businesses and industry groups, as well as other stakeholders, aiming to integrate and inform joint action.

As an organization, the Forum has a track record of supporting efforts to contain epidemics. In 2017, at our Annual Meeting, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched bringing together experts from government, business, health, academia and civil society to accelerate the development of vaccines. CEPI is currently supporting the race to develop a vaccine against this strand of the coronavirus.

Once a candidate vaccine passes through those hoops, the challenge is to produce it in the volume necessary to end a pandemic.

A number of organizations are helping to fund the process. Among them is Norway-based CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

It was first launched at the World Economic Forums Annual Meeting in Davos in 2017, with the intention of bringing together public, private, philanthropic and civil organizations to develop vaccines against epidemics.

Backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among other donors, in 2020 CEPI announced a new partnership to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.

It has issued an urgent call for $2 billion of new funding, to expand the number of vaccine candidates at the outset to increase the chances of success, and to fund the clinical trials.

Our ambition is to have at least three vaccine candidates, which could be submitted to regulatory authorities for licensure for general use/use in outbreaks.

CEPI has already provided funding to several organizations and institutions working on vaccines, including:

It remains to be seen how long it will take until there is a workable vaccine against COVID-19. For the time being, the best way to ensure you reduce your risk of infection is to follow the World Health Organizations advice on handwashing and social distancing.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Coronavirus vaccine: how soon will we have one? - World Economic Forum

Everyone agrees that a vaccine will be essential to stop the global spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. But Ofer Levy, a physician-scientist at Boston Childrens Hospital, worries that vaccines being designed today are not going to be effective enough for the people who need them most: older adults.

Whatever we develop, weve got to make sure it works in the elderly. Otherwise we dont have our eye on the ball. And right now, the way vaccines are developed, the eye isnt on the ball, says Levy, an infectious disease doctor who directs the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Childrens. Initial data suggest the virus that causes COVID-19 most severely affects people who are older than 60 and those who have preexisting medical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease or lung disease. A vaccine that protects young people would slow the viruss spread, but one that protects the most vulnerable will directly save lives, he says.

On the eighth floor of the Harvard Institutes of Medicine building, Levy and his colleagues are aiming to design a vaccine that will work for people of all ages. Their strategy involves testing candidates in a more realistic setting than most laboratories use and adding an adjuvanta substance that boosts the vaccines effectiveness while allowing the minimum possible dosage.

In banks of freezers kept at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the researchers lab has stored hundreds of samples of cells donated by older patients who were treated at the nearby Brigham and Womens Hospital before the current outbreak. In a neighboring freezer are newly arrived samples of the viral protein that the vaccine will target. Those samples will allow Levy and his collaborators to test vaccine-adjuvant combinations directly on cells from older people. By contrast, most vaccine research instead starts with cells from young mice, grown in blood products from cows.

Dozens of labs around the world are working on vaccine candidates, but it is too early to know which ones will advance far enough to win approvaland that could take at least 12 to 18 months, experts say. Time will tell if any of them will work well on older people, says Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a private-public partnership that provides vaccines for nearly half of the worlds children. The reality is: we need many shots on goal here, he says.

Levys program at Boston Childrens had focused on flu vaccine research, but it began to pivot to coronavirus work on January 1, when David Dowling, a vaccinologist and immunologist in the group, started hearing about a strange outbreak of pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan. When he learned that the virus mainly affected older people, he started to worry. I said, Everyones going to make a big mistake. Theyre going to be developing a vaccine that works in a normal, healthy population, and theyre going to miss the elderly. And were all going to lose a year, Dowling says. He started thinking about how he could look for a vaccine-adjuvant combination for this novel pathogen.

The human immune system, Dowling says, completely transforms during the first weeks after birth and changes dramatically again in old age. So, a vaccine that is effective in healthy adults may not work well at either the beginning or end of life.

For example, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline developed a malaria vaccine at a cost of about $2 billion that was shown to protect 30 to 50 percent of adults and about 19 percent of babies, Dowling says. But it seems to provide less protection to infants under the age of six monthswho are at the highest risk for dying from malaria. In a 2016 study, Dowling and Levy found that the white blood cells of infants do not mount a strong response to an adjuvant similar to the one in the malaria vaccine, suggesting the need to identify adjuvants with greater activity in early life.

Levy and Dowling are now beginning to develop and test adjuvants combined with various COVID-19 vaccine candidates. Levy says their menu of adjuvants, a portion of which the team had already been testing as part of its flu vaccine work, includes some they buy off the shelf, some that are homegrown (based on screening studiesof small molecules supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health), and some that other academic centers or companies are developing and have asked the group to evaluate.

The team at Boston Childrens is not the only group testing adjuvants. This week, for example, Dynavax Technologies, a biopharmaceutical vaccine developer in Emeryville, Calif., andClover Biopharmaceuticals, a China-based biotechnology company, entered into a research collaboration to study a vaccine-adjuvant combination against COVID-19.Clover is developing a protein-based coronavirus vaccine candidate called COVID-19 S-Trimer, and Dynavax is providing technical expertise and the companys adjuvant CpG 1018, according to a joint press release from the companies.

Although Levy and Dowlings project is still in the planning stage, they aim to test a vast number of possible vaccine-adjuvant pairings in cells from older adults. The plan is to find promising candidate combinations before moving them on to mouse testing, which is generally important for federal approval. There are so many variables involvedwhich host cell proteins to target, which adjuvants to use, the way the vaccine is formulated, the different populations that need to be addressedthat it would not be feasible to test every possible combination in large clinical trials. Instead evaluating these combinations in a cell culture could accelerate vaccine development and lower its risk, Levy says. The researchers hope to eventually test their candidate vaccine-adjuvant pairs in elderly individuals across the globe to make sure that the finished product will work in as wide a range of people as possible, he adds.

Many other groupsincluding at least 40 companies around the worldare working on their own COVID-19 vaccines. Cambridge, Mass., biotech company Moderna, supported by the NIH, has developed a candidate using the genetic sequence of the virus, and it is already being tested in the first patients. Modernas approach, which is based on protein-making instructions called messenger RNA, or mRNA, has never been employed in an approved vaccine. But before the COVID-19 outbreak, the technology had been tested in about 1,000 healthy people, and it effectively generated an immune response against other diseases, said Tal Zaks, Modernas chief medical officer, in an article I published in late January. He added that side effects were minimal and that older people benefited as much as younger ones. Based on the fundamental immunology and the initial data we have, my expectation is that it will work in older adults as well as it does in younger adults, Zaks said.

But Dowling is skeptical that such a novel tactic can be used to make the billions of doses that will be needed worldwide. And he is less confident than Zaks that it will protect older, vulnerable people. We might have a vaccine that works but cant be scaled or a vaccine that doesnt work and can be scaled, Dowling says.

In another approach, Natasa Strbo, a microbiologist and immunologist at the University of Miami, has been collaborating with Heat Biologics in North Carolina, to research a protein called gp96, which triggers both a targeted immune response and a broader, innate oneespecially in the lungs, gut and reproductive tract. The proper activation of innate immune responses is what is driving your successful vaccine immune response. Theres no doubt about that, Strbo says. In a sense, she adds, gp96 acts as both a vaccine and an adjuvant, so it will hopefully work well in those older than 60.

Levy and Dowling admit that other vaccines are further ahead of their efforts, with some already starting human testing. But the researchers think their work will be more efficient in the long run because they will leave the lab with a more effective product. What is faster, Levy asks rhetorically, finding a vaccine-adjuvant combination in a lab or doing 50 complex and expensive clinical studies and finding out later which vaccine worked best for the most vulnerable among us?

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Coronavirus Vaccines May Not Work for the Elderlyand This Lab Aims to Change That - Scientific American

Should scientists infect healthy people with the coronavirus to test vaccines?  Nature.com

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Should scientists infect healthy people with the coronavirus to test vaccines? - Nature.com

Petri, vice chair for research at the schools Department of Medicine, and his team are working on a COVID-19 vaccine using a new approach that would jumpstart peoples immune response to the virus by adding a new ingredient of sorts. He thinks his theory, if proven, could not only protect people against the coronavirus, but also improve upon existing vaccines like those used with the seasonal flu.

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A coronavirus vaccine from Virginia? These researchers are working on it. - The Virginian-Pilot - The Virginian-Pilot

For researchers working on possible coronavirus treatments, time is short.

More than 100 clinical trials of dozens of potential coronavirus treatments are already underway around the world, a mobilization of global medical resources rarely seen before in human history.

But science can be slow and indirect. And despite the sheer number of scientists involved in these efforts, the scientific method requires a rigor that can only be sped up so much.

Experts have said that it could take at least 12 to 18 months before a vaccine is commercially available to administer widely a timeline already seen as aggressive. And with international attention focused on coronavirus efforts, some researchers are warning about the potential pitfalls of accelerating scientific research and the risks of overpromising what science can deliver in a short time.

In an essay published Monday in the journal Science, the publications editor-in-chief H. Holden Thorp, a chemist and a former provost at Washington University in St. Louis, voiced concerns about the unusual nature of relying on science to find a swift solution to a problem with still many unknowns that is unfolding in real time.

The scientific method, Thorp wrote, inherently takes time, and involves basic research to first identify the problem and subsequently applying that research to test and build on scientists understanding.

Now, scientists are trying to do both at the same time, he wrote. This is not just fixing a plane while its flying its fixing a plane thats flying while its blueprints are still being drawn.

As new coronavirus cases multiply in many countries and fatalities rise, the scientific community is under enormous scrutiny and pressure to identify potential treatments.

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The proposed timeline of 12-18 months for a vaccine is already exceptionally fast given the normal pace of vaccine development and trials, according to Walter Orenstein, a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine and the former director of the United States National Immunization Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It often takes 10 years for a new vaccine to make it through all the steps and all the tests necessary, Orenstein said. The public health urgency of this is definitely moving things faster than would generally be done.

Part of the challenge of working at such an accelerated pace is ensuring that safety is not compromised.

Typically, clinical trials are made up of three main stages. Most of the trials currently underway are in the first phase, which is designed to test whether the experimental drug of a vaccine candidate is safe to give to humans.

Phase one is about basic safety does it make people get violently ill, or are there other extreme consequences? said Jeremy Block, a biochemist and co-founder of Medaptive Health, a New York-based company that develops tools to help scientists conduct clinical studies and trials. This step is not necessarily to see if the drug even does what you want it to do.

Once safety is established, the drug moves into phase two, which is designed to test its effectiveness and the specificity of the treatment.

If you give somebody a drug and it does a good job of killing the invading cells, but it also kills three of your main organs, it may be effective but it doesnt work specifically on what you want it to work on, said Block, who is part of Northwell Healths Institutional Review Board, which approves and monitors biomedical research on humans at the organizations hospitals.

The last step, and sometimes the most involved, requires demonstrating that the drug is effective in different populations, and thus would be safe and ready to administer widely.

But over the course of a clinical trial, there are few, if any, opportunities to speed up the process, Block said, particularly because scientists need to monitor the long-term effects of these new drugs.

All these things take time, and if we cut corners, bad things can happen, he said.

In 1982, for instance, research emerged that benzyl alcohol which is used as an anti-bacterial agent in some medical solutions and was approved for use in adults but had not been studied in children and infants was associated with 16 neonatal deaths at two medical centers in the U.S. And in the 1970s, pressure to rapidly develop and issue a new flu vaccine was later associated with hundreds of cases of a type of paralysis known as Guillain-Barr syndrome.

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Avoiding these types of dangers is even more important during a pandemic, because researchers will likely have to weigh potential risks and benefits that are magnified by the urgency of the situation, according to Orenstein.

Ideally you want a vaccine that is more than 90 percent effective, he said. But we would have to look at: Even with a less-than-ideal effectiveness, are there greater benefits if we can reduce the pressure on the health system? So it may be that under certain circumstances, a 50 percent effective vaccine is better than nothing.

Regulators will most likely also have to weigh these same risks in deciding whether a potential vaccine is safe for the general public, he said. In some cases, this may involve accepting the results of smaller trials that may carry more uncertainty than normal.

Orenstein said that over the course of his career, which includes 26 years working at the CDC, he cant recall a situation comparable to the one unfolding now.

Nothing comes to mind of this kind of setting, where were talking about a massive pandemic occurring and the longer we wait, the more we have potential for really adverse outcomes, he said.

But Thorp cautioned that putting pressure on the meticulous and sometimes deliberately lengthy scientific process could have negative impacts for both members of the public looking for hope and answers, and the scientists who are trying to deliver them.

I worry that engendering false hope will cause complacency that will deprive us of the time needed to find a lasting solution. And I worry about lasting damage if science overpromises, he wrote in Science. Lets underpromise. Lets overdeliver.

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Scientists, under pressure, try to balance speed and safety on coronavirus vaccine research - NBCNews.com