Efforts to develop a vaccine to fight Covid-19 visibly picks up pace amid research group reports of headways though no vaccine so far completed clinical trials while World Health Organisation (WHO) asked all not to expect the vital remedy in next one year, reports BSS.
According to global media reports over 100 potential COVID-19 vaccines are being developed while several of them were now exhausting clinical trials but experts fear possible setbacks and roadblocks might not allow the finished product to be widely available in 2020.
WHO said there are currently 8 COVID-19 vaccines to have entered the human trial phase but visibly preferred not to generate any fabulous hope about any overnight development regarding their effective applications while experts suggest it took years to produce such vaccine for an infectious disease.
Being the leading global health agency WHO, however, pioneers a campaign to raise an extra fund of US$8 billion to fight coronavirus and implement an Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator for global vaccine development.
The Reuters news agency appeared to have come up with the latest development in the research initiatives saying multinational Moderna Inc said on Tuesday secured US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) “fast track” designation to its experimental coronavirus vaccine.
According to the report the move would up the regulatory review process as the FDA’s “fast track” designation made the vaccine eligible for its “priority review” status.
The US agency now aims to take a decision on approving the drug within six months if the process found it alright while the company received $483 million funding from a US government agency to accelerate development of the vaccine.
FDA earlier also granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to pharma giant Roche’s COVID-19 antibody test as the company claims its test has 100% sensitivity and over 99.8% specificity at day 14 post-PCR confirmation of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Moderna said it expected to start a late-stage study of the vaccine in early summer for getting a marketing application approval in 2021.
The vaccine works on the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which instructs cells in the body to make specific coronavirus proteins that then produce an immune response.
According to the report the approach can be used in many types of treatments but has not yet been approved for any medicine.
Moderna has been racing to develop a safe and effective vaccine along with several other pharmaceutical entities and research groups’ including drug makers like Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer Inc, which is working with Germany’s BioNTech SE.
“The initial US trial aims to recruit up to 360 participants and follows a smaller German study of 12 volunteers, which began late last month,” the world’s famous scientific Nature journal reported.
A global coalition led by EU member states, Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and Norway pledged US$8 billion for developing Covid-19 vaccines and to ensure universal global access while the World Bank, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and other wealthy donors contributed to the initiative.
The United States created its own project, “Operation Warp Speed”, which aims to spend several billion dollars to produce enough doses of a potential vaccine to protect the US population.
The UK is at the front of the global effort and it has already begun human trials of its vaccine.
Oxford University’s Jenner Institute recently teamed up with AstraZeneca for the development and production of its viral vector vaccine, which started Phase I/II trials at the end of March.
The Serum Institute will provide production capacity in India. ChAdOx1, named after its chimpanzee adenovirus vector origin, already successfully completed two studies in rhesus monkeys.
If the positive animal results can be replicated in humans, Oxford’s vaccine could start Phase II/III as early as June, according to the Jenner Institute.
However, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday warned that an effective coronavirus vaccine may never be found, as he set out a strategy to ease current lockdown ensuring people’s protection from the deadly virus.
In terms of country-specific development regarding vaccine, Italy, one of the worst victims of the COVID-19 recently said they nearly readied their invention to be administered on human body.
Media reports said Italy was now carrying out tests at Rome’s infectious- disease Spallanzani Hospital where researchers successfully managed to generate antibodies in mice that “work” on human cells.
Italy’s major ANSA news agency claimed a research firm called Takis developed world’s first COVID-19 vaccine generating antibodies in mice that “work on human cells”.
The development came recently a day after Israel claimed that it achieved a “significant breakthrough” in developing an antibody to the coronavirus and applied for a patent.
Israel’s defence minister Naftali Bennett last week declared that the country’s Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) developed an antibody to neutralise the virus responsible for COVID-19 as “it can attack the virus within the bodies of the infected”.
Japan is expecting to begin clinical trials for vaccine to treat coronavirus in July, the country’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Monday adding that work on vaccines were being carried on several institutions, including University of Tokyo, Osaka University and the National Institute of Infectious Diseases.
The first human trial for a vaccine was announced last month by scientists in Seattle, skipping any animal research to test its safety or effectiveness.
In Oxford, the first human trial in Europe started with more than 800 recruits — half will receive the Covid-19 vaccine and the rest a control vaccine which protects against meningitis but not coronavirus, a BBC report said.
The vaccine was developed in under three months by a team at Oxford University with Professor Sarah Gilbert of vaccinology at the Jenner Institute, leading the pre-clinical research while the team said they could know within six weeks if it would work.
The NewYork Times recently reported that as Pfizer and the BioNTech announced that their potential coronavirus vaccine began human trials in the United States and even if the tests were successful, the vaccine could be ready for emergency use as early as September.
The Chinese Xinhua reported both Thailand and India were making significant effort to develop vaccines for COVID-19 while over 30 Indian vaccines were in different stages of Corona vaccine development with a few going on to the trial stages, it added.
The Chinese media said China developed three inactivated vaccines and a recombinant one has been put into clinical trials, and three of them have entered the second phase of clinical trials, including an inactivated vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech, a Beijing-based company.
Major European powers, along with Japan and Canada, made the biggest pledges from around 40 countries, but there was no official US representation, weakening the event and raising the prospect of an uncoordinated competition to develop and produce a vaccine for COVID-19.
