Health institutions and pharmaceutical companies around the world are mobilizing at full speed to search for possible treatments and vaccines to help slow the spread of COVID-19, the pneumonia caused by a new coronavirus that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan and whose progress, at the moment, has not been able to stop.
This Monday, the Modern Pharmaceutical Company (MRNA), located near Boston, issued a statement in which it revealed that it is currently developing a vaccine against the 2019-ncov coronavirus that has already reached phase I. This means that It has already passed laboratory or preclinical tests and is ready to be tested in humans.
The company has announced that it has already sent samples of the new coronavirus vaccine to the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Our team has made an extraordinary effort to respond to this health emergency at record speed,” he said. expressed by the technical director of the pharmaceutical company in the press release. “Collaboration with health institutions has allowed us to deliver the first clinical batch in just 42 days from the identification of the virus sequence .”
The new vaccine is based on encoding a stable form of the coronavirus Spike (S) protein, which takes two different forms: one before infecting the cell, and another during infection. The S protein complex is key to infection, as it is necessary to achieve fusion of the virus with the host cell membrane , and in fact it has already been a target used in the development of vaccines against the other ‘famous coronaviruses’, those responsible for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
The next step, as we have commented, will consist of a first trial in healthy people to begin to verify if the vaccine doses are safe and can induce an immune response.
Other vaccines in development against the new coronavirus
This US company is not the only one working at a frantic pace to develop a vaccine against the COVID-19 disease. In early February, the giant Johnson & Johnson also announced the beginning of its research program to search for a vaccine against the new coronavirus, in collaboration with various health institutions in the US. In addition, the company is reviewing its antiviral treatments against to other types of virus in case any of them could be effective in the treatment of the new pneumonia originating in China.
Another company that is already working on the development of a vaccine is Sanofi, which will use a technology that could generate an exact genetic match with the proteins present on the surface of the coronavirus. The SARS vaccine candidate, developed by this company in 2017, had already been shown to be partially effective in inducing immunity in animal models.
Health institutions call for a global effort
In a statement issued on February 25, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Associations and Industries affirmed that all its members are mobilizing rapidly and collaborating to try to identify among their treatment portfolios a drug that can serve as a basis for the development of drug treatment systems. detection and treatment that help slow the spread of COVID-19. “In addition, European industry is offering financial support and donations, as well as working closely with European, Chinese and global health authorities to combat this global public health emergency, ” the note said.
On the other hand, the European Medicines Agency has already announced the activation of its management plan for emerging health threats, reviewing all the information available on already approved medicines in case any useful could be found, and it is already investigating various treatments .
