Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi work in their lab at Texas Childrens Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, where their research team developed a vaccine candidate that may be able to protect against COVID-19. (Baylor College of Medicine Photo)
Seattles Infectious Disease Research Institute is working with Houstons Baylor College of Medicine to multiply the doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine by 30 to 100 times. Other partners in the effort include Seattle-based PATH and Texas Childrens Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.
If the project proceeds as planned, Baylor and its partners could repurpose a vaccine candidate originally created to counter a different coronavirus-based disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, to fight off COVID-19.
The recombinant-protein vaccine was tested against the SARS virus in preclinical trials, but because the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic faded away, the vaccine never got a chance to advance to clinical trials.
Now researchers at Baylor suspect that their nearly 200,000 doses of stockpiled vaccine just might provide protection against COVID-19.
The vaccine candidate is designed to train the bodys immune system to recognize a key piece of the SARS coronavirus spike protein, which helps the virus gain entry into cells. The virus behind COVID-19, known as SARS-CoV-2, has a similar protein.
IDRIs role is to determine whether ingredients known as adjuvants can be added to the vaccine to magnify its immunizing effect. If the adjuvants work, they could reduce the amount of vaccine needed per dose, said Corey Casper, IDRIs CEO.
Weve pioneered probably the largest collection of these adjuvant formulations that can be safely added to vaccines to increase their efficacy, to increase their potency, to increase the ability to store them, Casper told GeekWire. Theyve really revolutionized vaccines.
Most recently, adjuvants have provided a boost to GlaxoSmithKlines Shingrix vaccine for shingles as well as a variety of vaccine candidates for tuberculosis, Casper said. Baylor and PATH are hoping theyll do the same for their coronavirus vaccine.
If you only have 200,000 doses, thats not going to be enough to cover much of the population, Casper said. But if you added an adjuvant to that, and it increased the potency 30 to a hundredfold, all of a sudden you begin to have a really meaningful number of vaccines that could be used very quickly.
Even 20 million doses of safe, effective vaccine wouldnt be enough to immunize everyone. Casper and others involved in the campaign to quell COVID-19, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, say multiple manufacturers will have to make billions of doses. Among the other companies testing coronavirus vaccines are Moderna (which began its clinical trials in Seattle), Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca (in partnership with Oxford University).
If everything works out the way Casper hopes, Baylors vaccine could make a significant contribution to the cause. Vaccine manufacturing could conceivably ramp up to fill even more of the demand. But first, researchers have to verify that the vaccine is safe and effective.
Baylor and the Texas Childrens Hospital Center for Vaccine Development plan to start Phase 1 trials of the vaccine this fall. Researchers will be recruiting a relatively small number of healthy adults in Texas to check the vaccines safety. If the vaccine is safe, theyll follow up with more ambitious trials.
Our goal is to collaborate with IDRI and rapidly take our vaccine candidate, currently stored in the freezer, and manufacture clinical-grade vaccine formulations to accelerate their development and testing efforts in the clinic, Maria Elena Bottazzi, co-director of the vaccine development center and associate dean of Baylors National School of Tropical Medicine, said today in a news release.
Baylors Peter Hotez, another co-director of the center, noted that IDRI has been a collaborator on previous vaccine formulations. Similarly, we will accelerate our COVID-19 candidate and ensure we will have sufficient material to rapidly evaluate its safety and efficacy in the clinic, Hotez said.
Casper said the project plays to his nonprofit institutes strengths in vaccine formulation and manufacturing.
Whats really unique about IDRI is that for small biotech [companies] and for academics, theres very little access to manufacturing for vaccine products, he said. Its a complicated process, and its one that typically exists only in large pharma. So, several years ago, IDRI established a manufacturing facility here that allows us to make vaccines that are fit for clinical use at a smaller scale.
This isnt the institutes only project related to COVID-19. In April, IDRI and New Jersey-based Celularity won won clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to begin trials of an experimental cell-based therapy for the disease.
We now have several clinical trial sites that have been identified, Casper said.
One of the sites will be hosted by MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, Wash.
Theres no data we can share just yet, but we continue to be very excited, Casper said. This represents a new opportunity for a therapeutic approach to COVID.
To capture the speed and audacity of its plan to field a coronavirus vaccine, the Trump administration reached into science fictions vault for an inspiring moniker: Operation Warp Speed.
The vaccine initiatives name challenges a mantra penned by an actual science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke: Science demands patience.
Patience is essential for those who ply the science of vaccines. But in that field, challenging economic conditions and a forbidding regulatory system converge with the immune systems complexity and the resilience of microscopic pathogens. Add in drug companies preference for big profits and the result is a trash heap of failed and abandoned efforts.
In the last 25 years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved new vaccines for only seven diseases. A vaccine to protect against the Ebola virus won approval just last year, three years after the epidemic in West Africa ended.
But in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 Americans and cratered the U.S. economy, Trump has shown little tolerance for sciences deliberate pace. And scientists, with fingers crossed, are falling in line.
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The president declared that he wants 300 million doses enough to protect as many as 90% of Americans developed, manufactured and delivered by January 2021. He has ordered academics, government officials, private companies and the U.S. military to work together to make it so.
That means big and it means fast, Trump said. A massive scientific, industrial and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.
The new effort will demand the support, development, testing and assessment of several promising vaccine candidates by scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and companies and academic institutions across the world.
It will require the manufacture, procurement and storage of complex biologic medicines, as well as the vials, needles, syringes and storage equipment needed to deliver them. All will be needed on a massive scale.
And all that materiel will need to be transported, distributed and possibly administered by an army of logistics specialists.
Wherever possible, Operation Warp Speed envisions that many steps that have always followed each other in strict sequence clinical trials and production, for instance, or government approval and supply-chain development be done in parallel.
The program has already awarded a total of $2.16 billion to five companies with vaccine candidates at different stages of development.
To lead the effort, Trump tapped immunologist Moncef Slaoui, a pharmaceutical venture capitalist and former chairman of vaccines at the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline. The U.S. Armys most senior logistics and procurement specialist, Gen. Gustave Perna, will be the operations chief operating officer. Both expressed confidence in the operations success.
Perna called the project herculean. Slaoui, who has been criticized for holding a major stake in at least one of the vaccine makers that stands to benefit from Operation Warp Speed, told Trump we will do the best we can.
The time is short and the stakes are high. Just over four months after the coronavirus announced its presence inside the United States, President Trump is determined to send the country back to work.
With no effective treatment in sight, and no indication that the coronavirus would magically disappear, as Trump has frequently predicted, a vaccine will be the ultimate game changer in the pandemic, according Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations leading expert on the outbreak.
Theres never a guarantee of success, Fauci said. But he added that he was cautiously optimistic that by winter, at least one of nearly a dozen promising vaccine candidates would have shown itself to be safe and effective in inducing immunity in humans.
Vaccine scientists are similarly cautious, especially of a testing schedule that will compress both the size and duration of safety and effectiveness trials and even overlap them in a bid to save time.
Its fine for politicians to say were going to have a vaccine next month, said Mayo Clinic immunologist Dr. Gregory Poland. But the literature is littered with false starts and unanticipated safety effects in vaccines.
Poland noted that a vaccines rarer side effects are often not recognized until its put into broad use. To ferret out an adverse outcome that only occurs in one person in 100,000, for instance, a company would need to test it in 384,250 people from broad backgrounds and with a variety of medical conditions, he said.
Such large trials are unlikely in the rush to field a vaccine, Poland said, and he fears the result could be a dangerous erosion of public trust. The yearly flu shot carries a risk of less than 1 in 1 million cases of the neurological complication Guillain-Barre syndrome, he said. And even with that low a risk, close to half of Americans refuse to get it.
You have a whole spectrum of people out there who wont be reassured by any amount of information, Poland said. If we dont pay strict attention to safety, this is going to backfire.
Money may help. Congress approved $8.3 billion in early March to fund federal agencies pandemic response. And scientists across the world have been scrambling to design vaccines to protect a population with no immunity to the deadly new pathogen.
Scientists in China, Kazakhstan, India, Russia, Germany, Sweden and the United States have brought 10 potential COVID-19 vaccines to the point where they are being evaluated in humans in some form. Another 115 are considered by the World Health Organization to be in the preclinical stage of development.
In some cases, these preclinical vaccine candidates are scarcely off the drawing board. In others, they are still being tweaked or tested in cells. Some are being tried in lab animals.
The prospective vaccines range widely in their design and novelty. There are those that challenge a persons immune system with a killed or attenuated virus, the traditional approach used by the polio vaccine and other immunizations. Others are products of genetic engineering and have never been tried in a vaccine before.
The vaccine candidates also vary in their ease of manufacture, the number of doses a patient needs to gain lasting immunity, and the way they are administered.
FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn has said his agency evaluated about 10 vaccine candidates in early studies. By late May, it had narrowed its focus to five candidates that will begin a rapid and sometimes overlapping progression through human studies of safety and effectiveness.
Meanwhile, the groundwork for large-scale production is already being laid. Trump has said that the U.S. military may aid in the manufacture, and companies with the capability to produce vaccines will be recruited to do so.
Given the pressing urgency of the administrations deadline, vaccine candidates that can be produced fastest, transported most easily and administered to patients most efficiently will likely win the most and earliest support, experts said.
The redundancy built into Operation Warp Speed may also prove a vital safeguard against failure.
If the coronavirus shows signs that it is mutating in ways that could make one vaccine candidate ineffective, the scientific judges could swiftly shift their preferences toward a competitor that can be adapted more readily to changes in the virus. If rare but untoward effects show up with broader use, back-up vaccines could be brought on line. Some vaccines will be found to work better or worse in specific populations, and can be used accordingly.
The result will be an evolving panoply of vaccine choices, not only because some will be ready earlier than others, but because some will be more effective than others in certain populations.
There will be of necessity multiple types of vaccines, Poland said.
Michael S. Kinch, who directs the Center for Drug Discovery at Washington University in St. Louis, said that while there are pitfalls inherent to Operation Warp Speed, another pandemic offers comforting reassurance that in fielding the right drug, patience is an essential virtue.
In the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the first generation of drugs was mediocre at best, he said. As scientists learned more about the virus and the disease it causes, the medicines became more effective.
That may be a model for what were going to have here, Kinch said. We may not get the best vaccine up front. But hopefully it will be good enough and will be replaced later by better vaccines. We have may just have to live with that until we get a better one.
Dublin, June 03, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global Coronavirus Vaccine Market By Infection Type (HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, SARS-CoV, New Haven CoV, HKU1-CoV, MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, Others), By Vaccine Type, By Product Type, By Route of Administration, By Patient Type, By End User, By Region, Forecast & Opportunities, 2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.
The Global Coronavirus Vaccine Market is expected to grow at a robust rate during the forecast period.
The market is driven by the increasing prevalence of this disease across different parts of the globe. This has increased the need to protect the world from the virus, thereby expected to positively impact the market growth. Furthermore, increasing R&D activities by various pharmaceutical & biotechnology players for the development of potential vaccines is anticipated to foster the market growth.
According to WHO, there are 70 coronavirus vaccines under development by different companies and organizations. Out of these, three vaccines are already being tested in human trials. The vaccine developed by the Hong Kong based biopharmaceutical firm CanSino Biologics Inc. and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology is leading the race and is currently in the second phase of clinical trials. On the other hand, other vaccines developed by the US-based companies Moderna Inc. and Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc., have also started their human trials.
The Global Coronavirus Vaccine Market is segmented based on infection type, vaccine type, product type, route of administration, patient type, end-user, company and region. Based on infection type, the market can be categorized into HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, SARS-CoV, New Haven CoV, HKU1-CoV, MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 and others. The SARS-CoV-2 segment is expected to dominate the market since this infection or virus is the cause of the pandemic COVID-19 disease.
Regionally, the Global Coronavirus Vaccine Market has been segmented into Asia-Pacific, North America, South America, Europe, and Middle East & Africa. Among these, Asia-Pacific is expected to witness significant growth during the forecast period in the overall coronavirus vaccine market since China was the epicenter for the novel coronavirus disease and various Chinese companies & research institutes have already started working on various treatment options and vaccines to fight the disease. Additionally, other countries in the region such as India, Singapore, South Korea are also aggressively involved in developing vaccines and other treatments to curb the disease.
Major players operating in the Global Coronavirus Vaccine Market include Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Moderna, Inc., Novavax, Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Sanofi, Protein Potential, LLC, AlphaVax, Inc., Synairgen PLC, NanoViricides, Inc., GeneCure, LLC, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Zydus Cadila, Serum Institute, Bharat Biotech, CanSino Biological Inc, FluGen, I-Mab Biopharma, Medicago, Airway Therapeutics and others. The companies are developing advanced technologies and launching new services in order to stay competitive in the market. Other competitive strategies include mergers & acquisitions and new product developments.
Years considered for this report:
Objective of the Study
Key Topics Covered
1. Product Overview
2. Research Methodology
3. Impact of COVID-19 on Global Coronavirus Vaccine Market
4. Executive Summary
5. Voice of Customer
6. Global Coronavirus Vaccine Market Outlook6.1. Market Size & Forecast6.1.1. By Value6.2. Market Share & Forecast6.2.1. By Infection Type (HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, SARS-CoV, New Haven CoV, HKU1-CoV, MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, Others)6.2.2. By Vaccine Type (Inactivated Coronavirus Vaccine, Live Attenuated Coronavirus Vaccine, S-Protein Based Coronavirus Vaccine)6.2.3. By Product Type (Monovalent Vaccine v/s Multivariant Vaccine)6.2.4. By Route of Administration (Oral, Intramuscular, Subcutaneous)6.2.5. By Patient Type (Pediatric v/s Adult)6.2.6. By End-user (Hospitals, Clinics, Research Institutes, Others)6.2.7. By Company (2019)6.2.8. By Region6.3. Product Market Map
7. Asia-Pacific Coronavirus Vaccine Market Outlook
8. Europe Coronavirus Vaccine Market Outlook
9. North America Coronavirus Vaccine Market Outlook
10. South America Coronavirus Vaccine Market Outlook
11. Middle East and Africa Coronavirus Vaccine Market Outlook
12. Market Dynamics12.1. Drivers12.2. Challenges
13. Market Trends & Developments
14. Patent Analysis
15. Competitive Landscape15.1. Competition Outlook15.2. Company Profiles15.3. Company Details15.4. Financials (As Reported)15.5. Supply/ Value Chain Analysis15.6. Timelines For Drug Development To Commercial Launch15.6.1. Status of Approval of vaccines15.7. SWOT Analysis15.8. Key Market Focus and Geographical Presence15.9. Planned Investments15.10. Market Positioning15.11. Leading Players Profiled15.11.1. Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc.15.11.2. Moderna, Inc.15.11.3. Novavax, Inc.15.11.4. Johnson & Johnson15.11.5. Pfizer15.11.6. Sanofi15.11.7. Protein Potential, LLC15.11.8. AlphaVax, Inc.15.11.9. Synairgen PLC15.11.10. NanoViricides, Inc.15.11.11. GeneCure, LLC15.11.12. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)15.11.13. Zydus Cadila15.11.14. Serum Institute15.11.15. Bharat Biotech15.11.16. CanSino Biological Inc15.11.17. FluGen15.11.18. I-Mab Biopharma15.11.19. Medicago15.11.20. Airway Therapeutics
16. Strategic Recommendations
For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/kr8atp
Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.
Racing to find a COVID-19 vaccine. Thats the task facing pharmaceutical companies around the globe and right here in Connecticut.
The CaroGen Corporation is among several Connecticut-based companies working on a vaccine
The Farmington-based vaccine and immunology therapy company has been working on a formula since the pandemics early stages in February.
CaroGen Corporation CEO Bijan Almassian says they are in the animal testing stages of what is a complicated process.
Not only do you have to see the side of immunogenicity,you have to see how this immunogenicity lasts, he said.
Grotons Pfizer Pharmaceuticals announced in May it has moved beyond animal studies and is dosing humans with its vaccine candidate, one it developed in partnership with German pharmaceutical giant BioNTech.
In Meriden, Protein Sciences is also working on a formula. The subsidiary of Sanofi has developed two vaccine candidates. They have not done human testing yet but are aiming for the fall. The goal is to have an approved vaccine by years end, but there are many hurdles that must first be cleared.
First of all well have to see if the vaccine is safe and effective, said Clement Lewin, head of the BARDA office of Sanofi. When the vaccines come out its going to take a while to scale up manufacturing.
While parent company, Sanofi, is based in France, ProteinSciences Meriden location is considered a key location as the company works ona vaccine.
We, like everybody else, would like life to get back tonormal and I think without a vaccine, thats gonna be challenging, added Lewin.
Connecticut companies are also looking at ways to treat COVID-19 patients. New Havens Alexion is conducting a clinical trial of Ultomiris. The medicine is already on the market to treat two other rare conditions, Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, commonly known as PNH, and Atypical Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (aHUS).
Right now its under investigation, the dosage and the dosage regime, said Dr. John Orloff, head of Research & Development for Alexion.
Orloff explains there is evidence that coronavirus respiratory issues and subsequent organ failure could be caused by hyperactivity of the immune system itself.
For us its increasingly clear that much of the coronavirus related mortality is being caused by the body overreacting to the virus and attacking itself, said Orloff.
Accordingto Alexion, Ultomiris could help regulate this. Utomaris is a medicine known asa complement inhibitor. It works by inhibiting the bodys complement systemwhich forms the foundation of the immune system.
Alexionis also studying ways Ultomiris could benefit coronavirus patients who developblood clots.
Orloff says it has entered phase three of a clinical trial and is being used at centers around the US on patients with extreme cases of COVID-19. Orloff says the trial is being done on adult patients who are admitted to the hospital in respiratory distress requiring supplemental oxygen and in many cases, on mechanical ventilation.
For more than a dozen years, The Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use has helped countries invest in and implement evidence-based programs and interventions -- proven policies like creating smoke-free public places, banning tobacco advertising, increasing taxes on tobacco products, and requiring graphic pack warnings.In the midst of a pandemic, it's never been more important for leaders in the United States and around the world to protect and improve the health of their citizens, and we can do that by scaling policies that work. For instance, research shows that increasing tobacco taxes is the most cost effective intervention at our disposal to reduce tobacco use.
Tax increases can be implemented quickly, and we know they work. For every 10% increase in the price of cigarettes, demand is expected to decline by 4% to 5%, according to the World Health Organization -- and the resulting revenue can be substantial, which is especially helpful to governments during economic downturns like the one we face today.
The Congressional Budget Office is out with some grim projections, saying the U.S. economy wont recover from the coronavirus pandemic until 2029 and the recovery wont begin until next year.
The CBO projects the COVID-19 pandemic will cost the U.S. almost $8 trillion in lost economic output this decade, down 3% from pre-pandemic projections.
The agency says that consumer spending will decline amid high unemployment, and while many out-of-work Americans will get back to work starting this summer as states reopen, the CBO expects it will take a decade for employment to return to pre-pandemic levels.
The agency says until theres a coronavirus vaccine, some amount of social distancing will likely be with us for the foreseeable future, and that will slow the recovery.
The projections incorporate the more than $2 trillion in financial assistance the federal government has doled out.
The CBO says a lot of uncertainty remains about the pandemics effect on the economy, as well as the effect of the financial rescue program. Its projections are likely to change, as those are better understood.
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June 3, 2020, 9:07 AM
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Bringing America Back is an ABC News feature that highlights the day's top stories in economic recovery and medical preparedness amid the coronavirus pandemic. These stories delve into the key steps America is taking -- or needs to take. Stay on top of the latest developments regarding states' social distancing measures, advancements in the treatment of COVID-19 and more.
New research appears to back up public health experts' advice to socially distance -- and the farther the better. It also found that wearing a mask can reduce the risk of transmitting COVID-19 to about 3% from roughly 17%.
A waiter wearing a mask and gloves delivers food to a table to customers seated at an outdoor patio at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, May 29, 2020.
Experts say Dr. Anthony Fauci's estimate of a vaccine by January 2021 could be pushed back if we see a dramatic drop off in new infections. Once there is a viable vaccine, it will also likely take longer for children to be vaccinated.
Zola Dias was preparing to reopen his fashion and sneaker shop after the coronavirus pandemic, but then he lost everything when the store was looted amid protests over the killing of George Floyd. "To me, it was a double shock," Dias told ABC News. "I cannot even speak."
Prior to the pandemic, the Food Bank of Puerto Rico served approximately 1 million pounds of food per month. Lately, that number has nearly doubled, to 1.9 million pounds.
Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC News Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special coverage of the novel coronavirus with the full ABC News team, including the latest news, context and analysis.
Ibuprofen is being tested to assess whether it can prevent severe breathing problems in coronavirus patients and reduce the number of people needing treatment in intensive care units.
Researchers at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital and King's College London are looking at whether "a specific form" of the cheap anti-inflammatory drug can help cut serious side effects from COVID-19, potentially leading to shorter hospital stays.
Ibuprofen has previously been said by politicians in France to worsen the symptoms of coronavirus.
Professor Mitul Mehta has stressed that only hospitalised patients would be involved in the trial - to see if the drug will "reduce the respiratory problems they have", and not those who are so ill that they need to be in intensive care.
If successful, there would be a "number of benefits".
He said: "We could reduce the amount of time that someone spends in hospital - they might recover quicker and go home, that's obviously a fantastic outcome.
"We also might be reducing the degree of respiratory distress so that it can be managed in the hospital setting, without needing to go to ICU, and that is a fantastic outcome as well.
"Theoretically, this treatment, given at this time, should be beneficial."
Professor Mehta, however, said this was based on "animal studies".
"It's based on case reports, we need to do a trial to show that the evidence actually matches what we expect to happen."
He said that animal studies into acute respiratory distress syndrome - a symptom of COVID-19 - suggests that around 80% of animals die with it.
But when they are given this special formulation of ibuprofen, this drops to 20%.
"This is very promising," he said. "But of course it is an animal study, so we want to translate that really compelling result into humans."
Half of the patients involved in the trial will receive standard care, and the other half will receive standard care as well as the special ibuprofen formulation.
It is hoped that the way the drug has been formulated will reduce potential gastric side effects linked to ibuprofen.
Professor Matthew Hotopf, director of the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, said: "This highly innovative therapeutic approach seeks to rapidly advance a potentially important new treatment.
"If successful, the global public health value of this trial result would be immense given the low cost and availability of this medicine."
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Scientists in the UK launched a review to assess links to ibuprofen and coronavirus, after controversy over its use early on in the pandemic when a French health minister advised against the use of it.
The Commission on Human Medicines' expert working group concluded: "There is currently insufficient evidence to establish a link between use of ibuprofen and susceptibility to contracting COVID-19 or the worsening of its symptoms."
Tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm, Dermot Murnaghan will be hosting After The Pandemic: Our New World - a special live programme about what our world will be like once the pandemic is over.
Thursday's programme will include an exclusive interview with Prince Charles.
I took my father into hospital on 20 March, because I was sure he had coronavirus. We walked in together. He had worked for 46 years as a community pharmacist and I am a dentist. Neither of us had any idea that his situation would deteriorate to the point that I would be turning off his ventilator four weeks later.
My 74-year-old mother also got Covid-19, as did my pregnant wife. They recovered, but I could easily have lost all of them.
I believe my fathers death, like so many others, didnt need to happen. I want transparency, clarification of the facts and accountability not just for me, but for the tens of thousands of people who have lost loved ones.
We need an inquiry, but more urgently, given that were still in the middle of the crisis, we need to learn from mistakes. That is all I have ever asked for and that is why Im taking legal action against the government and PublicHealthEngland (PHE), on the basis that the health secretary and PHE failed to comply with their duties under the Human Rights Act regarding the right to life.
I am 99% sure I was the one that passed on coronavirus to my relatives. I fell ill around a week before. I rang NHS 111 and waited 40 minutes for them to tell me it was a cold because I didnt have a cough, one of the main symptoms of coronavirus.
I knew something was wrong. I had a high heart rate, which I thought was strange. I managed to get a private test done which came back positive for Covid-19. I was ultra-worried because Id seen my parents before I had symptoms. My father had otherwise been isolating because of his age, like I had told him to.
Assuming a median incubation period of five to six days as the medical papers suggest, followed by seven days of symptoms, I must have caught Covid-19 at the end of February. On 13 March, over a week before lockdown was introduced, the scientific advisory group of emergencies (Sage) concluded there are more cases in the UK than previously thought and we may therefore be further ahead of the epidemic curve.
Even though he was 80, my dad was very fit. When I took him in to hospital, the ward was half-empty. A few days later it was packed. Staff were off because they had symptoms and couldnt get tested. There were so many bank nurses who were stretched and not used to working in an environment of infection. I could see how things would escalate.
My dad didnt want to die. He survived for weeks on the ventilator but his doctors and I knew that if he ever came off it, he wouldnt be able to lead the life he had done before. He would have hated that. I went into a side room with the consultants permission in full personal protective equipment which I had bought; Dad was unconscious and heavily sedated. I held his hand and said, Dad, Im really sorry that I couldnt keep the promise I made you four weeks ago saying youd be home by the end of the week. I said I should have been more wary, that it should be me in that bed.
It was so painful and surreal. Sometimes I still cant acknowledge it happened, I think Im having a bad dream.
I believe the health secretary did not do all that could reasonably be expected to avoid a real and immediate risk to life of which he had knowledge.
Why did the government stop testing in those early days? Why didnt it inform us when it knew there was community transmission in February? The UK doesnt have the second highest mortality rate in the world for no reason. If the government and PHE had put this information in the public domain, and people still broke the rules of lockdown, that would have been different. It would have been because theyd disobeyed something the government had done to protect us.
Lives would have been lost under Covid-19 but I believe if the government and PHE had acted sooner with the information that they had, the death rate would have been substantially lower.
Once these matters are addressed hopefully we can prevent this from ever happening again. There will be more clusters of coronavirus and there may well be a second wave. We need to learn from the mistakes now, rather than later.
More information can be found here: www.crowdjustice.com/case/holding-the-government-to-account/
Leaders in the health tech industry are skeptical that a COVID-19 vaccine will be available by 2021.
Thats one of the takeaways from the latest Healthcare Prognosis Report, an annual 300-person survey published by venture capital firm Venrock that gathers opinions from members of the health tech industry on what to expect in the upcoming year. As the firm was working on the 2020 survey, COVID-19 landed in the United States and dramatically altered the course of the healthcare industry. Venrock subsequently decided to do three surveys over the course of eight weeks to get a more accurate reading of how industry leaders were feeling about the pandemic and to chart their changing perspectives. The list of contributors skews toward entrepreneurs, those working on healthcare delivery software, and health industry investors.
The first survey was sent out at the end of February, right as the first U.S. cases were discovered. The second survey was sent out four weeks later, by which point 1,500 Americans had died of COVID-19. At that point, 45% of participants believed a COVID-19 vaccine would become broadly available by 2021. By the third survey, optimism about a vaccine waned. That one went out at the end of April, when at least 90 vaccine candidates for COVID-19 were in development, seven of which had advanced to phase I trials. Despite this, only 31% of those surveyed thought a vaccine would be broadly available by 2021.
Respondents expressed similar doubts about the rapid development of treatments for COVID-19. By the time the second survey was issued, both remdesivir, an antiviral once tested as a possible treatment for Ebola, and chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which have been used to guard against and treat for malaria respectively, were being tested as potential treatments for COVID-19. The survey shows respondents were hopeful about them: Slightly more than half thought a good treatment would become available by 2021. In a subsequent survey, only 39% were positive a treatment would emerge within 18 months.
According to Bryan Roberts, a partner at Venrock whose portfolio includes 10X Genomics, Devoted Health, Doctor on Demand, and Lyra Health, the people who take his firms survey are predisposed to thinking about innovation in terms of its ability to scale quickly, which is inherently difficult for vaccines.
I think that between survey two and survey three it became clear that there was not a silver bullet that somebody could pull off the shelf that would be an awesome therapy, Roberts says of COVID-19. I would argue the same thing is true of vaccines.
It became clear that there was not a silver bullet that somebody could pull off the shelf that would be an awesome therapy.
Given the challenges of biomedicine, there are no guarantees that a vaccine candidate will succeed. One study found that over a 20-year span, an average vaccine had a 6% chance of making it to market. Notably, HIV still does not have a vaccine 30 years after it rose to prominence in the U.S., though it does have lots of treatments, including ones capable of suppressing the worst effects of the disease and mitigating its spread.
Development is not the only cumbersome aspect of making a vaccine thats accessible to everyone. Building up vaccine production facilities traditionally takes years. Companies that are working on COVID-19 vaccines are already discussing how to scale manufacturing infrastructure for candidates that are still in an early stage of development. Even with significantly crunched timelines, it could take a long time before a vaccine is widely available. However, biomedical companies, the government, and philanthropists are working to scale up vaccines quickly. Moderna, a company with an mRNA vaccine in clinical trials, says that it will have tens of millions of doses of its yet-to-be-approved vaccine by 2021, thanks to funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Johnson & Johnson, meanwhile, has announced a partnership with a manufacturer to supply 1 billion doses of its proposed vaccine. There is no guarantee that either Moderna or Johnson & Johnsons vaccine will ultimately work.
Venrocks survey is less an indicator of when a viable vaccine or treatment for COVID-19 will actually emerge and more reflective of the tech industrys expectations. The survey also indicates areas where health tech businesses might be investing, such as big data platforms and in-home care. COVID-19 and social distancing restrictions have pushed patients online, away from the doctors office and into video sessions and text chats with health professionals. The survey respondents expect that until a vaccine for COVID-19 is available, people may prefer to go online for their healthcare needs when possible.
As for big data, there is still a lot to learn about COVID-19. The virus has highlighted the importance of more open data in healthcare. One reason biomedical companies have been able to rally vaccine and drug development for COVID-19 is because Chinese researchers sequenced the genome of the coronavirus and published their findings early on in the outbreak. That kind of rapid scientific sharing has allowed researchers around the world to get to work developing medicines to combat the virus. While information about the coronavirus is being shared right now, disease research has not traditionally been so open. Medical research is often distributed across a web of publications and proprietary company databases in ways that are inaccessible to scientists broadly. There isnt a single platform researchers can easily access to search and analyze all past researcha major hurdle for biomedical innovation. Companies that use artificial intelligence to discover drugs were already thinking about how to amass and leverage big data before the coronavirus outbreak. However, the conversation around building big data repositories and analytics for health research has become more urgent.
Its important to remember that investors and health tech experts are not soothsayers, though they enjoy pontificating and placing big bets on the future. In the first survey, the vast majority of participants predicted deaths from the coronavirus in the U.S. would total less than 10,000. As of this writing, deaths related to COVID-19 in the U.S. have topped 100,000.
It reinforced for me how hard it is for any of us to quantify dramatic changes in existential risk, Roberts says.
