Drugmakers are racing to get a vaccine for the coronavirus approved this year, an ambitious goal considering the number of safety tests and trials a vaccine must pass before the public can access it.
A possible vaccine for the 2019 novel coronavirus, which has infected over 17,000 and killed at least 360 since late 2019, is stored in a laboratory refrigerator in Houston, Texas. It was first developed for a different coronavirus, SARS, in 2012, but researchers think it could be just as effective in 2020.
Dr. Peter Hotez of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development helped create the SARS vaccine, but it wasn’t ready in time for public use. He thinks it could be altered to prevent the 2019 coronavirus from spreading further, but the earliest it would be ready for human trials is months from now.
“With vaccine candidates, the technology can move pretty quickly, but you still have to do toxicology testing and phase one and two clinical trials,” Hotez told the Washington Examiner. “That’s the bottleneck we have. That takes time.”
About 10 pharmaceutical companies have coronavirus treatments or vaccine projects in the works, including Johnson & Johnson and Inovio Pharmaceuticals. Each will require several phases of testing and clinical trials, potentially lengthening the timeline for developing and introducing the vaccine to over a year from now. By that time, the virus could have sickened and killed thousands of people.
“The nightmare scenario is always developing a vaccine in the face of a public health emergency, as vaccines have inherently slow timelines because they’re the most rigorously tested products we have,” Hotez said.
Hotez and Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi created a vaccine for the 2003 coronavirus known as SARS, which killed about 800 people and sickened over 8,000. They won federal funding for the project in 2012. Once developed, they tested the vaccine on animals and produced enough of it to begin toxicology tests and human trials in 2016. Then, their funding dried out.
Once Hotez saw the genomic sequencing of the virus that Chinese researchers posted on an international repository for biochemical data last month, he realized how similar both viruses are in genetic structure.
Hotez said he and Bottazzi have been speaking with the National Institutes of Health and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and hope the administration will fund their work to alter the SARS vaccine so that it can also prevent the 2019 virus.
The NIH is currently working with Moderna Therapeutics to fast-track a vaccine specifically for coronavirus. Progress in developing the vaccine, which began late last year, has moved quickly. NIH has already sent its designs for how the vaccine would function to Moderna for development. Despite the fast-paced progress, though, the best-case scenario is that the vaccine will be ready for the first round of safety trials within the next three months.
A coronavirus epidemic can do a lot of damage in three months. But, Hotez said, coronaviruses such as the one from Wuhan are likely to reemerge and will require more biomedical research each time unless researchers can create a universal coronavirus vaccine.
“This is our third major coronavirus [epidemic] or pandemic of the 21st century,” Hotez said. “We have to recognize that catastrophic coronavirus epidemics and vaccinations need to be prioritized.”
