Top Texas researchers’ COVID vaccine approved to launch in India
HOUSTON — Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine on Tuesday announced Corbevax — a protein sub-unit COVID-19 vaccine — has received approval from the Drugs Controller General of India to launch in that nation, part of a large-scale rollout that could have significant global repercussions.
Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, said there will be no lag in distributing the vaccine to people in India: 150 million doses are ready immediately, with 100 million doses forthcoming each month.
The vaccine is the result of two years of effort by Hotez, his research partner Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi and their colleagues at Baylor and Texas Children’s to create “the World’s Vaccine” to hinder the spread of COVID-19 in countries that lack the United States’ resources.
“Even pre-pandemic, we’d written and proposed an idea to the National Institute of Health … about making a multivalent universal coronavirus vaccine even before SARS COV-2 erupted. And we were turned down. We were told it wasn’t innovative enough,” Hotez said Tuesday, laughing. “And it’s true, it’s not very innovative. But it works. And you can make it and vaccinate the world.
“Everyone talks about global equity. It took a small research institute in Texas to really practice global equity,” he said.
Hotez and Bottazzi have always viewed a coronavirus pandemic as a long, global game, rather than a short-term national crisis. While they credit Operation Warp Speed with the quick development of domestic vaccines, they also saw profound concerns: The Federal Aviation Administration estimates 2.9 million airline passengers disperse daily across tens of thousands of global flights.
“This was the flaw in Operation Warp Speed,” Hotez said. “It was so focused on speed and innovation — rapidly immunize the U.S. population. And it worked. You have to say it was a success. But the flaw was there was never anyone with situational awareness to realize new variants were going to arise out of unvaccinated populations in India and southern Africa.
It was never a plan in the U.S. government to vaccinate the world. That was a problem we saw.”
As COVID-19 variants continue to emerge and flourish in other nations before migrating to the U.S., Hotez and Bottazzi see international vaccination as the best possible way to stop the spread of the virus.
“This is a gift from Texas to the world,” Bottazzi said. “What else can I say?”
The immediate implications of Corbevax on those in the States feels distant when compared with vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer
and Johnson & Johnson. But as the delta variant gives way to omicron — a more transmissible version of the virus — the global reach of COVID-19 presents itself more clearly.
Corbevax recently completed two Phase III clinical trials with 3,000 subjects. The study suggested Corbevax offered a stronger immune response than Covishield, an Oxford-astrazeneca vaccine that has been used in India, without severe adverse reactions.
Corbevax, Bottazzi said, directly immunizes with a recombinant protein, rather than requiring processing within the body. “It enables the body to be able to respond immunologically faster,” she said.
The technology has been around for half a century. “We know how it behaves, how safe the vaccines are,” Bottazzi said. “We use them in infants, so they’re more likely to be acceptable with a varied global population.”
They’re looking into possibilities for a multivalent or universal coronavirus vaccination.
“We know we can target specific locations of the spike protein, which can broaden the response,” Bottazzi said. “Which could protect ourselves from future coronaviruses.”
About a decade ago, Hotez and Bottazzi started working on coronavirus vaccines, which “had been orphaned as well,” Hotez said. “We did it the only way we knew how to do it: simple, low-cost, durable vaccines
for resource-poor settings. When COVID-19 came along, we were able to pivot.”
They’d developed hepatitis vaccines, among others. But still Hotez and Bottazzi faced some degree of disinterest because the diseases they sought to stifle were far from home. Nevertheless, they found interest in Houston’s medical community.
“We had the benefit when we were recruited to come to Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor, we came with a program we’d launched on coronavirus vaccine development,” Bottazzi said. “The interest in coronavirus vaccines was known around 2016, and Baylor said, ‘Continue working on this. It will be needed at some point.’ ”
Hotez added, “We knew there would be a big problem, that we could never get big policymakers to roll the dice with us. Everybody was focused on speed and innovation.”
The two were instead focused
on what Hotez referred to as “durable, lowcost vaccinations for the poor. We could’ve done it faster if we had a fraction of the support Moderna and those guys got.”
But being in Houston, with the support of Texas Children’s and Baylor, the two found funding for research and development, including a $1 million grant from Texas-based Tito’s Handmade Vodka.
“We didn’t have a lot of support from major government agencies,” Bottazzi said. “Almost no funding. But it was really the philanthropic nature of our institutions that gave us funding. And dedication from partners like those in India. Working together made this happen.”
Bottazzi’s and Hotez’s work speaks to Houston’s draw as a major international medical center. Hotez came to Houston a decade ago from George Washington University, where he had begun collaborating with Bottazzi, a native of Italy who grew up in Honduras. The duo has spent two decades researching and seeking ways to halt the spread of “neglected tropical diseases.”
The beauty of their work during those 20 years, Bottazzi said, is “it doesn’t stop scaling up because of the actual vaccine components.” She speaks about the many ways their work could positively affect people years from now.
Because of their work studying SARS in other parts of the world, Bottazzi and Hotez were prepared for the coronavirus pandemic in ways others were not.
On Jan. 14, 2020 — Hotez remembers the date clearly — he saw the COVID-19 sequence show up in the biorxiv archive.
“I called Maria Elena and said, ‘We got this, we can do this,’ ” he said.
Hotez pointed out that “people across the southern hemisphere have already been vaccinated with the same technology as have their kids and babies. So it’s not a stretch there. They’ve tried it, they liked it. No buyer’s remorse. That’s going to be very important for global vaccination.”
They’re already working to find ways to move the vaccine into Africa.
And the work won’t stop with the current pandemic. Hotez brought up Chagas, a parasitic disease prevalent in Latin America. And Bottazzi said they’re “already designing potential vaccine prototypes to address longer term goals.”