EVEN ON THE FAST TRACK, VACCINE COULD TAKE YEAR
The urgent hunt for a coronavirus vaccine is on a “war” footing, pharma execs and researchers say, but it will be at least a year before a treatment can be developed, approved and in distribution even on a fast track, as the virus spreads worldwide.
“We’ve declared war against this virus,” said CEO and Founder of Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Joseph Kim. “Our race and our target is the virus. We are racing against time because now we are almost at 100,000 people infected.”
Inovio, based in Pennsylvania, is one of many companies working to blaze through each time-consuming and difficult obstacle in creating a vaccine, such as testing in humans and animals, and then scaling up to manufacture millions of doses. Cambridge-based Moderna this week shipped a possible vaccine to the National Institutes of Health to begin testing.
“It will get worse before it gets better, so that’s why at Inovio we are very energized and incentivized to get our vaccine ready and test them,” Kim said.
Inovio makes vaccines using strands of DNA instead of virus pathogens, meaning their vaccine provides a “picture” of the virus to the immune system, so it can recognize it and attack, “Think about it as Instagram for the immune system,” Kim said.
Drug companies and research institutes such as Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi Pasteur, CureVac and Novavax all announced efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine shortly after the Chinese government released the viral sequence of the infection on Jan. 10.
Gregory Glenn, president of research and development at Novavax said coro
navirus has “exploded quickly,” and creating a vaccine within the year is aggressive but possible.
“We’re going to do everything we can to advance the ball as quickly as possible,” Glenn said. Novavax is planning a clinical trial for its coronavirus vaccine in late spring, using the coronavirus spike protein.
Scientists are attacking the vaccine at all angles.
Cambridge biotech firm Moderna is developing a messenger RNA vaccine. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease researchers in Montana are working on a chimpanzee adenovirus-vectored vaccine. NIAID scientists at Baylor College are evaluating a severe acute respiratory syndrome recombinant protein vaccine.
Experts say the hardest part of making a vaccine is clinically testing it to make sure it’s safe and then ramping up production for mass distribution, a process that takes about six months for more routine seasonal flu vaccines.
Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said, “It takes time to get the results and show that the vaccine is safe and effective, then you have to be able to manufacture it in large enough quantities in order to vaccinate a large swath of people.”
Peter Kolchinsky, who studied virology at Harvard and then founded RA Capital Management, a firm that invests in companies developing drugs and medical devices, said, “My most optimistic guess would be that we have an approved vaccine in the second half of 2021, but even then at scales that would require that we give the first doses to those most at risk.”
Inovio is already testing its vaccine in animals, and will later move on to humans in the United States and China. Kim said the company is planning for a one million dose preparation by the end of the year.
“I hope it doesn’t take two years. I like to count this in a matter of months,” Kim said.
Coronavirus has infected at least 80,000 people and killed more than 2,700 worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, spreading to 37 countries outside the outbreak epicenter in China in a matter of weeks.