Labs race for coronavirus cure

In the space of a week two mice will receive injections at university laboratories in London and Oxford.

The first, on Monday at Imperial College, will help the rodent’s muscle cells to begin making proteins that look a lot like those on a coronavirus. A week later in Oxford, barely a month after Chinese authorities alerted the world to their outbreak, another mouse will also receive an injection – and with luck its immune system will produce the antibodies that could stop the epidemic.

Their efforts, along with those of a handful of laboratories around the world, are part of a race to stop a pandemic.

Robin Shattock, of Imperial, said he had never seen a response like it. Processes that in the past took months or years have been compressed into weeks. ‘‘We’ve done it about as fast as anyone could do it,’’ he said.

After Chinese scientists published the genetic code of the coronavirus, he and his colleagues were ready to begin work to produce a vaccine to combat it.

His approach involves an RNA vaccine. Conventional vaccines involve a weakened or dead version of the virus that you want to combat. By injecting it, you can teach a body’s immune system to make antibodies to attack it – so that if somebody is exposed to the virulent version they are immune.

Shattock’s vaccine contains a string of RNA (ribonucleic acid), the code the body uses to make proteins. This particular sequence of RNA is the same as a section in the coronavirus. When it is injected on Monday, he believes that the RNA will instruct the mouse’s muscle cells to make proteins like those on the outside of the virus, and so train the body to fight them.

The Oxford team is trying a completely different approach. When the outbreak began Professor Sarah Gilbert was already testing a vaccine for Middle East respiratory syndrome, another coronavirus. It was relatively simple to adapt the technique to

Oxford

the new virus. Unlike the Imperial team, the vaccine they test on February 18 will consist of a live virus, but one that cannot reproduce. Inside it will be a section of genetic code from the coronavirus, providing the instructions to make the coronavirus protein after vaccination. It also trains the body to attack the virus.

Gilbert said that the speedy response was a reflection of years

‘‘The 2014 ebola outbreak changed a lot of thinking. We’ll have a lot more of these outbreaks, and we need to know we can respond quickly, that once we have the sequence we can get going straight away.’’ Professor Sarah Gilbert

of preparation. ‘‘The 2014 ebola outbreak changed a lot of thinking. We’ll have a lot more of these outbreaks, and we need to know we can respond quickly, that once we have the sequence we can get going straight away,’’ she said.

There are many ways in which both vaccines could fail, as they look to enter human trials in the summer. It is also possible that, by then, the outbreak will have fizzled out. – Sunday Times