By Adekunle Yusuf
After infecting over 13 million people and causing the death of almost 600,000, Coronavirus remains the world’s undisputed number one public health emergency.
Despite efforts to contain rising infections, community transmission of the virus is still spreading like wildfire in many countries, including Nigeria.
Sadly, the crisis gets worse by the day around the world because there are still no vaccines to protect the body against Covid-19.
But if happenings in the global medical community are anything to go by, the dire picture of rising infections and harvest of deaths may soon give way, as medical researchers seem to be working hard to change the unsavory narrative.
In the United States, Novavax has secured $1.6 billion funding for COVID-19 vaccine production. The fund is expected to help Novavax start a final-stage study of its vaccine candidate.
An American Vaccine Development Firm, Novavax Inc, one of the front runners in the race to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 treatment, will receive $1.6 billion funding from the US government to support large scale manufacturing of coronavirus vaccine.
This is a boost to the initiative by the US government, to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.
The biotech firm said the funds would be used to conduct advanced human studies and engage in manufacturing to deliver 100 million doses as soon as late 2020.
Novavax had earlier secured as much as $388 million in May from the coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, the single largest contributions from the organisation at that time.
The biotech company’s vaccine candidate is to provoke the production of antibodies that prevent the spike protein which the coronavirus uses to infect host cells.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), drug manufacturing firms and university researchers are investigating more than 140 experimental vaccines. Pfizer and the University of Oxford, in collaboration with AstraZeneca, are among the companies and institutions that have started studies of their vaccines in healthy patients.
Also, an experimental COVID-19 vaccine developed by Moderna Therapeutics, a US biotech firm, has generated a positive response in a second human trial.
The biotech firm first announced positive interim clinical data from the phase one of the study in May. On the safety of the vaccine, the study said no major side effect was recorded as participants only experienced minor fatigue, chills, headache, myalgia, and pain at the injection site.
“No serious adverse events were noted, and no pre-specified trial halting rules were met. Local adverse events, when present, were nearly all mild or moderate, and pain at the injection site was common.
Across both vaccinations, solicited systemic and local adverse events that occurred in more than half the participants included fatigue, chills, headache, myalgia, and pain at the injection site,” the study read.
The United States Food and Drug Administration has authorised that next phase of the study involving 30,000 people. It will also compare the efficacy of the vaccine against a placebo.
Moderna was announced as one of the five vaccine developers chosen to be part of President Donald Trump’s operation warp speed programme to accelerate development of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Gilead Sciences, a biopharmaceutical company in the US, is also at the forefront of finding a vaccine for the disease.
All things being equal, Moderna is in pole position in the global race to find a vaccine against Covid-19. China’s SinoVac is also at an advanced stage; while Russian researchers have completed clinical trials on a vaccine, though they have not shared data.
Much work still needed to be done
Because research is on a breakneck speed, 18 out of about 200 potential vaccines around the world have progressed into clinical trials.
This means such vaccine candidates are now being tested on people, with the first human trial data appears positive. Although a vaccine normally takes years – sometimes decades – to develop, researchers appear to be racing against time to achieve the same amount of work in only a few months.
With the frenetic pace of work done so far, experts expect wide availability of a vaccine by next year, which would be a huge scientific feat.
No doubt, multiple research groups have designed potential vaccines in some countries, with promising clinical trial results to show for their efforts.
However, experts insist that a lot still needs to happen before a vaccine gets to the users. Part of work to do involves trials, which need to show the vaccine is safe because it would not be useful if a vaccine candidate does more harms than the disease.
Besides this, clinical trials will also need to prove that the vaccine brings about an immune response that can protect users from getting sick.
A successful vaccine candidate needs to scale the hurdle of ability or plan to produce billions of doses. This is a stage country regulators must approve before progress is attained.
And if a vaccine is eventually developed, then there will be a limited supply, at least initially. This means prioritising will come into effect, as healthcare workers who are in the frontline of the fight to contain Covid-19 pandemic may top the list.
So are the aged people and others battling pre-existing medical ailments because the disease is most deadly in such people.
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