As the race to find a novel Coronavirus vaccine continues across the globe, Russia has reportedly become the first country to complete clinical trials of a vaccine candidate, with the potential to be distributed from around mid-August.
A vaccine could be rolled out across the U.K. by the first half of next year, while Australia began a human trial of its vaccine candidate in Queensland on Monday.
There are at least 160 potential novel coronavirus vaccines being developed by researchers in the U.S., Europe, China and Australia. They include 21 vaccine candidates in clinical evaluation and 139 under preclinical evaluation, according to the latest July 6 report from the World Health Organization.
Here we take a closer look at some of the recent COVID-19 vaccine developments.
Russia
The results of human clinical trials completed at Russia’s Sechenov University were reported to have proven the effectiveness of its vaccine candidate, according to Elena Smolyarchuk, the head and chief researcher at the university’s Center for Clinical Research on Medications, Russia’s TASS news agency reported Monday.
“The research has been completed and it proved that the vaccine is safe. The volunteers [of the clinical trials] will be discharged on 15 July and 20 July,” Smolyarchuk told TASS. The participants of the trials will remain under medical supervision on an out-patient basis after they are discharged, Smolyarchuk noted.
Alexander Gintsburg, head of Russia’s Gamalei Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology where the vaccine was developed, hopes the vaccine will “enter civil circulation” on August 12 to 14 and that private companies will begin mass production by September, he told TASS.
Clinical trials on two formulations of the vaccine candidate were launched last month at Sechenov University, with 18 people vaccinated on June 18, followed by a second group of 20 people vaccinated on June 23, TASS reported.
The potential vaccine has reportedly been developed by the same government labs that produced an effective vaccine for the Ebola virus as well as MERS virus, The Washington Post reported.
Australia
Australia launched a human trial for its vaccine candidate on Monday at the University of Queensland (UQ).
Phase one of the trial sees 120 volunteers, aged between 18 and 55, injected with the potential vaccine, while a proportion of participants receive a placebo, the UQ statement noted.
UQ associate professor and infectious diseases expert Paul Griffin, a principal investigator at the Nucleus Network, confirmed participants would receive two doses during the trial and would be monitored for 12 months.
“We expect to have preliminary results after about three months, and if all goes well, we can move as fast as we can to the next stage in the vaccine’s development,” Professor Paul Young, another co-leader of the UQ vaccine project, said in the statement. “That will be a larger trial with people from a range of ages, to ensure the vaccine works across the board,” he said.
U.K.
There are currently two vaccine candidates in development in the U.K., including one at Imperial College London which could potentially be available for use by the first half of 2021, according to Professor Robin Shattock, the head of the vaccine development team at the university.
“We anticipate if everything goes really well, that we’ll get an answer as to whether it works by early next year,” Shattock told the U.K.’s Sky News on Sunday.
“And we have put in place the infrastructure to make that vaccine for the whole of the U.K. So, assuming that the funding is there to purchase that vaccine, we could have that vaccine rolled out across the U.K. in the first half of next year.”
The first doses were reported to have been given to 15 trial participants earlier this month. Two doses will be administered to 300 people in the current phase, with plans for a further efficacy trial on 6,000 people to begin in October, Imperial College London reported this month.
The trials are reported to be the first test of a new “self-amplifying RNA” vaccine technology developed by Shattock and his team, which unlike most vaccines, doesn’t use real virus particles, Imperial College London reported earlier this month.
Last month, British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced it would be supplying up to 400 million doses of its AZD1222 vaccine to European Union countries. The vaccine has been developed by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute and the Oxford Vaccine Group.
U.S.
On July 8, biotechnology firm Moderna completed enrollment for the phase two trial of the mRNA-1273 vaccine as well as for the National Institutes of Health phase one study of the vaccine, the company confirmed in a statement earlier this month.
The first phase of the vaccine trial began in March at Seattle-based Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.
Emory University’s Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit in Atlanta, Georgia was added by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is funding the trial, as a second test site for the first phase of the study.
China
Chinese biopharmaceutical company CanSino Biologics, which in May launched the first human trials for its Ad5-nCoV vaccine, was reported to be in discussion with Russia, Brazil, Chile and Saudi Arabia to begin a phase three trial of its vaccine candidate, Qiu Dongxu, the executive director and co-founder of CanSino, confirmed Saturday at an antiviral drug development conference in Suzhou of eastern China.
He noted that the phase two trial showed “much better” results than the phase one trial about the vaccine’s safety and ability to trigger an immune response. The phase three trial is likely to begin “pretty soon,” with 40,000 participants to be recruited for the trial, according to Qiu, Reuters reported.
Two other vaccine candidates in China, developed by Sinovac Biotech and a unit of China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), have already been approved for phase three trials, Reuters reported.
Source: newsweek.com
By Soo Kim
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s editorial stance
The post Russia makes giant stride in Coronavirus vaccine appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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