Pandemic inspires a scientific miracle Normally … you’re scrambling for funds
How the world is winning the race to find a vaccine
IT took a miraculous 303 days to develop and test the first vaccines against COVID-19 but the aim is to do it in just 100 days when the next pandemic strikes.
And we could end up with some vaccines that don’t even need a needle to deliver them – nasal sprays, skin patches and electrical pulses are all being trialled as delivery methods.
This month three COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca reported finalstage clinical trial results showing they were between 70 and 95 per cent effective at preventing COVID-19.
These vac vaccine developers have achieved in 10 months what normally takes es 10 years; the fastest vaccine ever produced took four years to get off ff the ground.
Philanthropic group CEPI, which helped fund the development nt of three of the first successful essful COVID-19 candidate vaccines, met its initial target to have a candidate ready for testing within 16 weeks of the disease’s genetic code being sequenced. Next time it wants to do even better.
“One of the things CEPI is talking about is, ‘could we have 100 days as a reasonable objective?’,” said CEPI representative and former A u s t r a l i a n Health Department chief Jane
Halton. Halton The COVID-19 COVID 19 legacy is a series of new plug-and-play technologies that will speed up vaccine development against future pandemics, she said.
Traditionally, vaccines were based on weakened or harmless versions of the agent that caused the disease, and took a long time to make.
The flu vaccine takes six months to update every year because new flu strains have to be grown for weeks then injected into hens’ eggs to make multiple copies before being harvested and killed, and only then is ready for use to make a vaccine.
Pfizer and Moderna Moderna’s s COVID COVID-19 19 vaccines use a revo revolutionary new method involving g MRNA made using a chemical al process rather than a biological cal one as in the flu vaccine.
This means it can be scaled led up and mass-produced much faster. ster.
Within days of the genetic code of the virus that causes COVID-19 D-19 becoming available, scientists at these labs were able to produce the MRNA code for vaccine testing.
In future pandemics the same platform could be used again and scientists would simply plug in the MRNA code from whatever new pathogen emerges.
These types of vaccines had never been involved in large-scale human clinical trials before and the proof they worked so well – preventing more than 90 per cent of cases of serious disease – is a huge scientific win. The problem is that they need to be kept at super-low temperatures, which makes distribution problematic.
Work is under way to see if they can be freeze-dried and perhaps administered using a skin patch
The Oxford/astrazeneca vaccine uses another plug-and-play platform, Chadox1, based on a chimpanzee adenovirus, similar to the virus that causes a common cold in humans.
The Oxford team used this virus as a carrier and added to it the DNA sequence for the spike protein from the virus that causes COVID-19.
Backed by funding from CEPI, the Oxford group had previously tested Chadox1 vaccines against MERS, flu and tuberculosis and knew it worked, and they were quickly able to transition to making the COVID-19 vaccine.
The other factor in vaccine speed is the vast amounts of money that allowed the vaccine makers to run several different clinical trial stages simultaneously and ramp up production of the vaccines even before knowing they worked.
“Normally, at every stage when the phase-one trial is complete, you’re scrambling for funds to fund phase two, and it’s only when that is compliant that we can try and access funds for phase three,” said Nucleus Network’s Paul Griffin, who is running clinical trials on four COVID-19 vaccines.