The scalable low-cost vaccine developed by a team at Texas Children’s Hospital promises to provide billions of shots to developing countries, a major win in the fight against COVID-19 variants arising in areas with low vaccination coverage.
The vaccine designed by Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi uses the tried-and-tested recombinant protein technology similar to what is used to make the hepatitis B vaccine to target the spike protein on the coronavirus. Unlike the mRNA vaccines created by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which contain modified genomes that teach the body’s cells how to identify and attack the spike protein, Hotez and Bottazzi’s vaccine can be assembled cheaply and stored easily. The recombinant protein vaccine has been found to be comparably effective to the mRNA vaccines.
“The attraction is that technology is already in place and has been for years, sometimes decades, in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Brazil,” Hotez told the Washington Examiner. “If you aspire to make a COVID vaccine for global health, this is the best technology to select because it’s already in place and you can partner with developing countries’ vaccine manufacturers.”
It was authorized for use in December in India under the name Corbevax, and vaccine manufacturer Biological E is now making the shots. BioE already has 150 million doses of Corbevax ready to be administered, and it plans to manufacture 1.2 billion doses in 2022.
The highly transmissible and virulent delta variant, which is still driving hospitalizations and deaths in the United States, arose from a largely unvaccinated population in India. As long as large swathes of the global population are unvaccinated, the coronavirus will have unfettered access to human immune systems, in which it can replicate and eventually mutate into new strains better at infecting people.
Research and development of the Corbevax vaccine really began years ago during the 2003 SARS outbreak, when Hotez and Bottazzi developed a shot for that coronavirus. The team had been researching vaccines for diseases that would otherwise go unconsidered in the U.S., such as hookworm disease or the tropical parasitic Chagas disease because they primarily affect people in poorer developing countries.
“That leverage we gave to the manufacturers we’re working with is that we already had engineered what we call the seed — that is, the starting material that you can use to then produce this recombinant protein,” Bottazzi said. “So we shaved practically years off design and engineering because we already have some know-how for SARS and MERS.”
Bottazzi added that the team handed the “recipe” to Indian vaccine makers that have been able to scale up in large quantities. The process was also uncharacteristically speedy. The vaccine prototype was created from January to March last year. They transferred the recipe to BioE in May, and by July, the company was already conducting clinical trials using the vaccine.
The vaccine development timeline, which would normally take at least a year, has been drastically condensed to fit demand. The major federal initiative to develop vaccines and treatments, dubbed Operation Warp Speed by the Trump administration, was crucial in getting effective vaccines for COVID-19 out in a fraction of the time. But Operation Warp Speed was not a solution to the dearth of accessible shots for poor nations.
The Operation Warp Speed emphasis on innovation did not endear federal officials to Hotez and Bottazzi’s “oldie but goodie” vaccine technology, and the team was left to rely on philanthropic donations from private foundations in Texas, such as the MD Anderson Foundation and Tito’s Handmade Vodka. The team said it has resumed talks with high-level Biden administration officials about striking a deal with a U.S. manufacturer to mass-produce shots and distribute them to poor countries.
“[Operation Warp Speed] was all based on speed and innovation and incentivizing the pharma companies to rapidly immunize the U.S. population,” Hotez said. “That was important, but the problem with it was [it] never balanced with vaccines that could be scaled for the world. When you focus only on new technologies, there’s a learning curve to go from zero to 9 billion to vaccinate the Southern Hemisphere and low- and middle-income countries.”
