The Department of Health and Human Services will collaborate with a New York-based pharmaceutical company to develop a treatment for the coronavirus, which has killed at least 420 people and infected over 20,000.
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. is teaming up with the agency, using DNA-editing technology the company developed to create treatments for the Ebola virus in 2015 with HHS support.
“Working as public-private partners like we have with Regeneron since 2014, we can move rapidly to respond to new global health threats,” said Dr. Rick Bright, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority at HHS.
The office is also working with the Department of Defense to review possible treatments and vaccines, particularly those that were developed for the previous coronaviruses that infected thousands: MERS and SARS.
At least 10 pharmaceutical companies are racing to come up with a vaccine for the coronavirus, many of which were first created to prevent the spread of SARS.
Dr. Peter Hotez of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development helped create a vaccine for SARS in 2012 but ran out of funding in 2016 before it was ready for public use. Now, he and his research partner are asking the government to renew their funding, because Hotez believes tinkering with the SARS vaccine could create a new strain to prevent the latest coronavirus from spreading.
Still, he said any treatment or vaccine in development would take months before it can begin clinical trials.
“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.”
HHS has not offered a prospective timeline for creating the treatment with Regeneron, which would be the first of its kind to treat the 2019 novel coronavirus.
