esearchers racing to produce a vaccine for the Wuhan coronavirus believe they may have taken significant steps towards finding an effective method of immunisation.
At least three pharmaceutical companies, as well as teams of researchers around the world, have been working on different approaches to producing an effective vaccine. These efforts accelerated after Chinese academics publicly posted the genetic sequence for the virus.
A research team at the National Institutes of
(NIH) in Maryland said they had prepared a modified version of a key section of the virus to encourage the body to produce antibodies against the disease.
As well as the NIH, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) has
(£8.4m) to three programmes led by the companies Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna, and the University of Queensland, with the hope of having a viable vaccine in production within 16 weeks, although testing for safety and efficacy will take much longer.
With different teams competing to produce a trial vaccine, it remains unclear who is leading the race.
Kizzmekia Corbett, lead researcher on the NIH coronavirus vaccine team, said her group had been concentrating on the spike proteins – the spear point of the virus,. This built on work done during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak that first emerged in
in 2001, another coronavirus thought to be similar to the Wuhan virus.
The virus looks like a knobbly ball covered in protrusions that widen at the tip. These are spike proteins, which are able to dock to a receptor found in the lung membrane known as ACE-2, which allows the virus to enter the body.Corbett said that since the release of the Chinese sequence on 10 January, her team had been working around the clock to produce a stable version of the key protein that would prompt a strong antibody defence to prevent the virus entering the body.
She said: “Coronaviruses are generally just a large family of pathogens of which six – well, now seven – are infectious to humans.
“Sars and the Wuhan coronavirus are similar across 82% of the entire genome. But from a vaccine point of view we were interested only in the spike, which is 70% identical.
“We had already published research on Sars and Mers (Middle East respiratory syndrome) and shown we could drop some stabilising mutations into the backbone of the spike after a colleague did this with the S protein of the respiratory syncytial virus,” she added.
“Since 2017 we have been looking at how you give the body the right kind of messenger RNA that will attract the right type of cells to produce the right type of antibodies to produce a potent vaccine. We’ve been doing these sequences for the last three years now so we can basically plug and play, and are now able to look at any coronavirus spike sequence.”
One of the problems, said Corbett, is that the corona spike protein is the largest of its kind to infect humans. “One of the reasons it’s so hard to look at is because is is so big and floppy,” she said.
Corbett believed the previous work done at her institute and others may have reduced the timeframe for producing an effective vaccine. “We don’t want to ignite public hope but the goal is do it as fast as we can and we are working day and night. I lost 7lb in recent weeks!”
The NIH team is among several that have been working on solutions to the wider problem of coronaviruses since the first emergence of Sars. Many of the teams noted that vaccine work would be further advanced if not for the loss of interest in research after the Sars outbreak was brought under control.
