Scot working ‘day and night’ on vaccine

A SCOTTISH scientist racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine last night declared: ‘We are working night and day on this.’

Kate Broderick, 42, is sleeping just two hours a night in a desperate attempt to tackle the epidemic that has claimed more than 200 lives.

She is working with a team of researchers in America, testing a potential vaccine on mice and guinea pigs. ‘The situation is changing so fast,’ Dr Broderick said. ‘The number of cases, the number of countries that are declaring infected patients, I feel a personal responsibility to do everything that’s in my power to work towards a vaccine.

‘I’ve spent my entire life working towards making a difference in an outbreak setting like this and I will do whatever it takes,’ she added.

The scientist, from Dunfermline, Fife, has been battling infectious diseases for more than 20 years. She helped to create successful vaccines for ebola, zika, lassa fever and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), and said she is still ‘pretty amazed’ that she has ended up fighting pandemic virus outbreaks at Inovio pharmaceutical company in San Diego, California.

She added: ‘We have the opportunity to save some lives on the basis that we do this as fast as we can. I feel that responsibility very heavily.

‘You can disconnect yourself sometimes in science and not really think about the implications of what you do. But on the news every day we are hearing about people suffering and dying. It’s very hard not to internalise that.’

Dr Broderick hopes to start clinical trials of the coronavirus vaccine on humans in early summer and her team are in talks with the US Food and Drug Administration to secure ‘emergency-use authorisation’ to introduce the vaccine internationally as soon as possible. She hopes they will be able to deliver a vaccine quickly, saying: ‘Two or three years ago during the zika outbreak we received the viral sequence and within seven months we had put that vaccine into human clinical testing.

‘For this coronavirus outbreak we are trying to do it much faster.’

Her team has received a

£6.8 million grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which will help distribute the vaccine if it is approved.