kovat 19 SARS CoV to the coronavirus no matter which name you've heard of the
virus and the pandemic it's caused impacting lives physically financially
and socially billions of people are social distancing and while we do our
part to combat the spread of the disease researchers are working endlessly to
produce a sustainable and reliable vaccine to finally end this crisis as
we've seen in the news there are teams globally working on vaccine solutions
and as of April 8th there are 115 vaccine candidates in varying stages of
research every day there seems to be a new development private companies like
moderna and inovio are making headlines as they're quickly progressing in the
first stages of the vaccine approval process a process that usually takes
years is being pushed in a matter of new months and that's the question with
urgency looming how viable are many of these fast vaccines and are we going to
have a vaccine solution within a year short answer a very apprehensive may be
so with everything by everybody in every place works perfectly could you
theoretically accomplish this in 18 months
I think it's optimistically 12 to 18 months under normal circumstances it
takes five to ten years to develop a vaccine it is a process designed to be
appropriately slow reflective evidence-based peer reviewed by other
scientists and then used in under normal circumstances taking vaccines from the
lab to licensing for public distribution not only takes time but money roughly 1
billion dollars worth or more but a large part of the acceleration of the
vaccines were hearing about have to do with an international organization that
launched in 2017 called the Coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations or
SETI the thing about these vaccines is that you need to have funding to move
from one stage to the next Zika disappeared so they took the money
away Ebola disappear so no money you have you have to get out
of that cycle so actually sepia merged because they
knew that this was a problem what would we do if something big came up and of
course it's a good thing they planned because something big did come up and
that's why Sethi had the funding available immediately to give to
organizations like Madera nikeyra back in ovo in Queensland and while the
funding helps to speed up the process the teams chosen by sepi also are
already ahead in their vaccine research teams either have experience with
previous outbreaks like MERS we're working on novel vaccine methods that
could significantly reduce the development timeline but before we get
carried away with how these new research platforms work we should know the
vaccine basics essentially a vaccine can be made in a few different ways we have
inactivated and live attenuated both known as whole pathogen vaccines subunit
vaccines including recombinant polysaccharide and conjugate vaccines
which are using a piece of the pathogen or the newer method of nucleic acid
vaccines using the DNA or RNA of the pathogen when injected into our body's
vaccines all aimed to mimic the infectious agent typically a vaccine is
often given with an adjuvant to boost the initial immune response after the
injection this response sounds the alarm in our body and begins the organization
of white blood cells like killer T cells and specific proteins called antibodies
killer T cells destroy the pathogen and the infected cells and the antibodies
neutralize the pathogen in SARS CoV to s case the antibodies head toward the
recognizable spike proteins on the outer shell of the corona virus and block the
proteins from connecting to the receptors of our cells this whole
process helps the body's immune system get trained by the vaccine and retain
the memory of the infection so that when a vaccinated person encounters a real
virus like SAR Co b2 they can quickly recover so basically your body comes up
with the preventative measures it needs to fight the pathogen we just need to
initiate that exposure in the old days we would just grind up the virus or the
bacteria and kill it with formalin or heat and inject it into animals and
sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't as we've
gotten more sophisticated now we can use molecular biology to either make these
tiny little proteins or to make particles that look like the virus or
you can make DNA or RNA vaccines all of these things have a potential to work so
which ones are set be focusing on well right now they have a number of funded
vaccine candidates in their portfolio but out of those funded platforms we're
hearing mostly about four of them to mRNA vaccines from moderna and cure back
one DNA vaccine from inovio and a protein vaccine from Australia's
University of Queensland there are no licensed DNA or RNA vaccines on the
other hand we believe that they can be made rapidly I mean I think you heard
inovio say that within three hours of seeing the sequence they had designed
the vaccine that they intended to take into humans it takes longer for protein
vaccine it takes longer for a whole inactivated virus vaccine that every
group is pursuing what it does best given the urgency of finding a vaccine
during this pandemic we're looking for new approaches like DNA and RNA vaccines
because they can be developed quickly however that doesn't mean that work on
other promising solutions stops as experts are advocating for a multi prong
approach when it comes to developing vaccines because we'll need as many
candidates as we can to pass the rigorous approval phases but what
exactly are these phases well for example once a viable coronavirus
vaccine candidate has been identified in preclinical studies they can move on to
the highly-anticipated phase one of the approval process space one studies
involve tens of people the moderna mRNA vaccine that's being
tested in the US will enroll forty five people and what you're doing there is
you're again looking to see does it produce an immune response and does it
appear to be safe now you only have tens of people so you won't see very much
once that hurdle is passed we can enter Phase two where the study enrolls
hundreds of patients now you're getting more refined in what doe
how to administer it how many doses you're looking again for immunogenicity
you might get some hints about effectiveness and you're looking for
safety and so phase two can actually be a fairly long time because you're
testing multiple things you're looking at your results because really the cost
of failure for large companies is huge that distance between phase 2 and phase
3 is somewhat affectionately called the valley of death and the reason for it is
the vast majority of vaccines and drugs will not make it into or past phase 3
but let's say a corona virus vaccine it does pass if so it will go into phase 3
where thousands to tens of thousands of people are enrolled in a trial now what
you're looking at is efficacy does it actually work not just raising the
immune response but does it actually prevent disease from here the FDA
scrutinizes the data collected across all three phases if it all looks good
then they give the final approval on licensing and manufacturing whew we did
it it only took hundreds of hours of
vaccine development three major clinical trials and hundreds of thousands of
people plus a number of approval committees so by now you're probably
wondering how do we telescope something that is five to ten years into something
that may be 12 to 18 months so you do face two very close to Phase one maybe
overlapping it partially and then you see that you get the right protective
responses in the laboratory and rather than waiting until you've got all the
data to the very end of the trial you may wait a month to make sure that the
best responses are present and then based on those best responses either the
company or maybe sepi or a government will say okay fine let's move on to see
if this actually protects very quickly again if everything goes right and we
see no safety signals it would be possible it may be longer and so we're
going to have to get ready for co-ed 19 and living with it and figuring how to
work around it okay so best-case scenario we're looking
at 12 to 18 months before we have a viable
vaccine but even if this ambitious timeline is accomplished researchers
will need to find the means of being factoring it but there's some 8 billion
people on our planet but if they overcome all these challenges we'd be
looking at a vaccine that was developed at a historical speed one with the
potential to save millions of lives Kovan 19 is a huge subject one that's
impacted each and every one of us if there's another aspect of it that you
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see you next time