THE FRONT RUNNERS
In the World Health Organization April 4 report on the “draft landscape” for Covid-19 vaccine candidates, there are two in the clinical trials phase, while about 60 others are in more preliminary evaluation stage.
CANSINO
BIOLOGICAL INC BEIJING INSTITUTE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY
Phase 1 trials
PARTICIPANTS: 108 (divided in three groups of 36)
This vaccine will use the adenovirus type 5 – a pathogen that commonly infects people and leads to mild conditions. Cansino has used the same technology to create an Ebola vaccine, which was the first such shot approved anywhere based on the strain behind the deadly epidemic
This is a stage of research that focuses on the safety of a drug. This stage is usually conducted with healthy volunteers, and the goal is to determine the drug's most frequent and serious side effects and, often, how the drug is broken down and excreted by the body. These trials usually involve a small number of participants.
This is the first of multiple steps in the clinical trial process for evaluating the potential benefit of a vaccine.
NEXT PHASE OF TRIALS
Phase 1 trials are carried out by small groups of healthy individuals. The subsequent phases (II and III) will involve larger groups as well as patients. These will give crucial information on the efficacy and safety of the vaccines
To help speed up this aspect, billionaire philanthropist and former Microsoft boss Bill Gates announced his foundation will fund production of 7 vaccine candidates even before they are cleared. "Even though we'll end up picking at most two of them, we're going to fund all seven so we don't waste time…"
MANUFACTURING
The vaccine will ideally need to be shipped across the world to its nearly 7.5 bn population. Production usually begins after regulators clear the vaccine – a process that could take months as it involves analysis of all data from the trials
LICENSING
The vaccine will also include the question of who gets to sell it and the sharing of proprietary information. The heads of WHO and Unitaid, a Un-backed group, last week backed a proposal by Costa Rica for companies to pool their intellectual property rights
"It'll be a few
billion dollars we'll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don't get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in this situation we're in, where there's trillions of dollars being lost economically, is worth it," he said