An Oxford University professor who is leading a team of researchers in Britain for a vaccine to battle SARS-CoV-2 says she is “80% confident” they can find one that works by autumn.
Sarah Gilbert told The Sunday Times of London over the weekend that human trials for a possible vaccine are set to begin before the end of April and a working product could be produced by September — but only “if everything goes perfectly.”
“I think there’s a high chance that it will work based on other things that we have done with this type of vaccine,” said Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology. “It’s not just a hunch and as every week goes by we have more data to look at. I would go for 80 percent, that’s my personal view.”
The British government signaled “that it would be willing to fund the manufacture of millions of doses in advance if results looked promising. This would allow it to be available immediately to the public if it were proven to work,” the Times reported.
“We don’t want to get to later this year and discover we have a highly effective vaccine and we haven’t got any vaccine to use,” she said. “We don’t think we need facilities built, there are facilities that can be switched over.”
Her team is just one of many around the world working to find a vaccine, but Gilbert was careful to add that “Nobody can promise it’s going to work.”
Scientists say that the virus has mutated close to 10 times, but that’s a slower rate than other respiratory viruses, especially the flu. What’s more, scientists say the mutations don’t vary much from the original virus that emerged in Wuhan, China, which means when a vaccine is available, it would protect against both the original virus and mutations, likely for several years.
U.S. researchers are also well on their way in their efforts to discover a vaccine.
The first potential vaccine began human testing in mid-March. The National Institutes of Health is funding that trial, which is taking place in Seattle at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. That testing began with 45 young, healthy volunteers who have been injected with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc.
A second potential COVID-19 vaccine entered Phase 1 clinical human testing last week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted an application from Inovio Pharmaceuticals.
“Inovio plans to inject its first volunteer test subject with the INO-4800 DNA vaccine candidate it has developed, following promising results from preclinical studies performed on animals that did indicate increased immune response,” Tech Crunch reported Monday.
“This is a significant step forward in the global fight against COVID-19,” Dr. J. Joseph Kim, INOVIO’s president and CEO, said in a statement. Tech Crunch said Inovio was able to produce thousands of doses “in part thanks to backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as funding from other nonprofits and organizations.”
Meanwhile, a first set of tests in mice of a potential vaccine to prevent COVID-19 has shown it can spur the animals’ immune systems to produce antibodies against the coronavirus.
The vaccine is delivered via a fingertip-sized, Band-Aid-like patch made of 400 tiny needles that scratch the skin. The researchers who are developing the vaccine say the immune system reacts more readily to irritations of the skin, which means doing so could trigger it to target the coronavirus.
When tested on mice, they developed antibodies to fight the coronavirus within two weeks.