Category: Covid-19 Vaccine

Then came the novel coronavirus, which began in China and has inflicted its worst damage in the US. Each government has pointed fingers at the other to deflect criticism of its own COVID failings.

How might the pandemic, and its aftermath, alter the rivalry between the world's two largest economies?

China's COVID initiative In some ways, coronavirus has boosted China's international image. Its success in containing the virus, the relative COVID chaos in the US and Europe, and China's willingness to help struggling governments, even in Europe, with critical medical supplies and cash, has allowed Beijing to claim a crisis leadership role that once fell to Washington. Meanwhile, China's economic growth looks to be less affected by the pandemic, as the IMF predicts Chinese GDP will continue to expand this year, even while America's contracts.

Continuing US advantages China's rise doesn't imply a post-COVID US decline. In fact, though COVID has wreaked political and economic havoc in the United States, and government dysfunction is a large and growing problem, the US has lasting advantages that gives it staying power as a central international actor.

The US has long been the world's number one food exporter, and game-changing innovations in energy production have made the US the world's top oil producer. In addition, dollar dominance won't last forever, but today's governments still need greenbacks, allowing the US to continue borrowing as no other country can.

But the biggest post-COVID US advantage is the current dominance of its tech companies. That's why technology is the arena where the post-COVID US-China rivalry will become most intense.

The tech battlefield Today, 11 of the world's 13 largest internet companies are US-based, and the US produces more of the tech startups that will drive innovation in the AI and other cutting-edge technologies that will soon dominate global economic development. COVID enhances those US advantages, because contact tracing, immunity passports, and remote work, enabled by new technologies that US companies have a jump on, are now more important.

Chinese companies, with priority backing from their government, are working in all these same areas and will continue to make progress, and China's government is going all in to make China a technology superpower over the next decade.

Which country will assume the lead in the race for 5G? Will one country gain an insurmountable advantage that allows its regulators to write the rules that govern these technologies? That will be the US-China battleground where the stakes are highest.

The election wildcard The outcome of the US elections in November will also mark a turning point in US-China relations. On the one hand, no matter who wins, Washington and Beijing will remain on a collision course: opposition to some of China's trade practices and the ways it uses data to limit individual freedom are rare issues on which Democrats and Republicans agree. And the US public's distrust of China is at its highest level since polling on the issue began 15 years ago.

If President Trump wins re-election, he's likely to continue the current aggressive unilateral US approach on trade and intellectual property questions. But a President Biden would likely be much more inclined to coordinate pressure on China with likeminded traditional allies in Europe and Asia. That's why Chinese officials may have more to fear from Biden's alliance-building than from Trump's more impulsive go-it-alone approach. If so, a Biden win might ease the tone of the rivalry in the near-term, but broaden and deepen its substance over time.

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The Graphic Truth: Competing and cooperating on a COVID-19 vaccine - GZERO Media

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The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and Snapdragon Chemistry are teaming up to develop a continuous manufacturing platform to produce a specific raw material for COVID-19 vaccines.

They are developing ribonucleotide triphosphates (NTPs), a critical raw material for COVID-19 vaccines that use messenger RNA technology. The project includes a scalable, continuous manufacturing process for the purification of NTPs.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) is present in all living cells and carries instructions from the DNA of one cell to another. Right now, one of the COVID-19 vaccines being developed with federal funding use mRNA technology and rely on NTPs.

With a small footprint and low capital cost, multiple identical platforms can be deployed to vaccine manufacturing facilities in the United States. This provides a more reliable way of producing the NTP component of some COVID-19 vaccines.

This project is one component of BARDAs rapidly expanding COVID-19 medical countermeasure portfolio.

Snapdragon Chemistry, based in Waltham, Mass., is a chemical technology company focused on the design and development of manufacturing processes for chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

As part of the governments Operation Warp Speed initiative, BARDA is working to remove any barriers to vaccine production and provide the services and expertise private sector partners need to accelerate development and manufacturing.

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BARDA teams up with Snapdragon to develop materials for COVID-19 vaccine - Homeland Preparedness News

COVID-19 (coronavirus) vaccine: Get the facts

A vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is perhaps the best hope for ending the pandemic. Currently, there is no vaccine to prevent infection with the COVID-19 virus, but researchers are racing to create one.

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that cause illnesses such as the common cold, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). COVID-19 is caused by a virus that's closely related to the one that causes SARS. For this reason, scientists named the new virus SARS-CoV-2.

While vaccine development can take years, researchers aren't starting from scratch to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Past research on SARS and MERS vaccines has identified potential approaches.

Coronaviruses have a spike-like structure on their surface called an S protein. (The spikes create the corona-like, or crown-like, appearance that gives the viruses their name.) The S protein attaches to the surface of human cells. A vaccine that targets this protein would prevent it from binding to human cells and stop the virus from reproducing.

Past research on vaccines for coronaviruses has also identified some challenges to developing a COVID-19 vaccine, including:

Global health authorities and vaccine developers are currently partnering to support the technology needed to produce vaccines. Some approaches have been used before to create vaccines, but some are still quite new.

Live vaccines use a weakened (attenuated) form of the germ that causes a disease. This kind of vaccine prompts an immune response without causing disease. The term attenuated means that the vaccine's ability to cause disease has been reduced.

Live vaccines are used to protect against measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox and chickenpox. As a result, the infrastructure is in place to develop these kinds of vaccines.

However, live virus vaccines often need extensive safety testing. Some live viruses can be transmitted to a person who isn't immunized. This is a concern for people who have weakened immune systems.

Inactivated vaccines use a killed (inactive) version of the germ that causes a disease. This kind of vaccine causes an immune response but not infection. Inactivated vaccines are used to prevent the flu, hepatitis A and rabies.

However, inactivated vaccines may not provide protection that's as strong as that produced by live vaccines. This type of vaccine often requires multiple doses, followed by booster doses, to provide long-term immunity. Producing these types of vaccines might require the handling of large amounts of the infectious virus.

This type of vaccine uses genetically engineered RNA or DNA that has instructions for making copies of the S protein. These copies prompt an immune response to the virus. With this approach, no infectious virus needs to be handled. While genetically engineered vaccines are in the works, none has been licensed for human use.

The development of vaccines can take years. This is especially true when the vaccines involve new technologies that haven't been tested for safety or adapted to allow for mass production.

Why does it take so long? First, a vaccine is tested in animals to see if it works and if it's safe. This testing must follow strict lab guidelines and generally takes three to six months. The manufacturing of vaccines also must follow quality and safety practices.

Next comes testing in humans. Small phase I clinical trials evaluate the safety of the vaccine in humans. During phase II, the formulation and doses of the vaccine are established to prove the vaccine's effectiveness. Finally, during phase III, the safety and efficacy of a vaccine need to be demonstrated in a larger group of people.

Because of the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine regulators might fast-track some of these steps. But it's unlikely that a COVID-19 vaccine will become available sooner than six months after clinical trials start. Realistically, a vaccine will take 12 to 18 months or longer to develop and test in human clinical trials. And we don't know yet whether an effective vaccine is possible for this virus.

If a vaccine is approved, it will take time to produce, distribute and administer to the global population. Because people have no immunity to the COVID-19 virus, it's likely that two vaccinations will be needed, three to four weeks apart. People would likely start to achieve immunity to the COVID-19 virus one to two weeks after the second vaccination.

A lot of work remains. Still, the number of pharmaceutical companies, governments and other agencies working on a COVID-19 vaccine is cause for hope.

Until a COVID-19 vaccine is available, infection prevention is crucial. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend following these precautions for avoiding infection with the COVID-19 virus:

If you have a chronic medical condition and may have a higher risk of serious illness, check with your doctor about other ways to protect yourself.

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COVID-19 (coronavirus) vaccine: Get the facts - Mayo Clinic

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LAURAN NEERGAARD AP Medical Writer

June 11, 2020, 6:19 PM

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The first experimental COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. is on track to begin a huge study next month to prove if it really can fend off the coronavirus, while hard-hit Brazil is testing a different shot from China.

Where to do crucial, late-stage testing and how many volunteers are needed to roll up their sleeves are big worries for health officials as the virus spread starts tapering off in parts of the world.

Moderna Inc. said Thursday the vaccine it is developing with the National Institutes of Health will be tested in 30,000 people in the U.S. Some will get the real shot and some a dummy shot, as scientists carefully compare which group winds up with the most infections.

With far fewer COVID-19 cases in China, Sinovac Biotech turned to Brazil, the epicenter of Latin America's outbreak, for at least part of its final testing. The government of So Paulo announced Thursday that Sinovac will ship enough of its experimental vaccine to test in 9,000 Brazilians starting next month.

If it works, with this vaccine we will be able to immunize millions of Brazilians, said So Paulos Gov. Joao Doria.

Worldwide, about a dozen COVID-19 potential vaccines are in early stages of testing. The NIH expects to help several additional shots move into those final, large-scale studies this summer, including one made by Oxford University that's also being tested in a few thousand volunteers in Brazil.

There's no guarantee any of the experimental shots will pan out.

But if all goes well, there will be potential to get answers on which vaccines work by the end of the year, Dr. John Mascola, who directs NIHs vaccine research center, told a meeting of the National Academy of Medicine on Wednesday.

Vaccines train the body to recognize a virus and fight back, and specialists say it's vital to test shots made in different ways to increase the odds that at least one kind will work.

Sinovac's vaccine is made by growing the coronavirus in a lab and then killing it. So-called whole inactivated vaccines are tried-and-true, used for decades to make shots against polio, flu and other diseases giving the body a sneak peek at the germ itself but growing the virus is difficult and requires lab precautions.

The vaccine made by the NIH and Moderna contains no actual virus. Those shots contain the genetic code for the aptly named spike protein that coats the surface of the coronavirus. The body's cells use that code to make some harmless spike protein that the immune system reacts to, ready if it later encounters the real thing. The so-called mRNA vaccine is easier to make, but it's a new and unproven technology.

Neither company has yet published results of how their shots fared in smaller, earlier-stage studies, designed to check for serious side effects and how well people's immune systems respond to different doses.

Even before proof that any potential vaccine will work, companies and governments are beginning to stockpile millions of doses so they can be ready to start vaccinating as soon as answers arrive.

In the U.S., a program called Operation Warp Speed aims to have 300 million doses on hand by January. Under Brazil's agreement with Sinovac, the Instituto Butantan will learn to produce the Chinese shot.

AP journalist Marcelo Silva de Sousa contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Final tests of some COVID-19 vaccines to start next month ...

As the world waits for a coronavirus vaccine, some scientists are proposing that existing vaccines could give the bodys immune system a much-needed temporary boost to stave off infection.

Its still unclear whether such an approach would work, and some experts are skeptical. Others including researchers in Israel, the Netherlands and Australia are already investigating whether a tuberculosis vaccine could help jump-start the immune system and make COVID-19 less deadly, though the World Health Organization strongly advises against using that vaccine until its proven effective against the coronavirus.

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In the U.S., several big names in virology including Dr. Robert Gallo, the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and one of the scientists who discovered HIV are turning their attention to another existing vaccine, the oral poliovirus vaccine. It hasnt been licensed or available in the U.S. since 2000, but is still used in other countries where poliovirus still circulates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Polio was eradicated in the U.S. in 1979.)

In a perspective piece published Thursday in the journal Science, Gallo and other experts from the Baltimore-based Global Virus Network outline why this particular polio vaccine might hold potential and why the group is seeking funding and approval to start clinical trials to test their hypothesis.

The polio vaccine in question is a live vaccine meaning it uses a weakened form of the live virus.

Live vaccines trigger a general immune response that helps the body fight off invaders until the immune system has time to develop specific antibodies. In theory, scientists believe that this temporary immune boost could provide protection for viruses the vaccine was not designed to prevent, such as the coronavirus, said a co-author of the Science piece, Dr. Konstantin Chumakov, a member of the Global Virus Network, an international coalition of virologists aimed at preventing and eradicating virus disease.

(Chumakov is also associate director of research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administrations Office of Vaccines, but spoke to NBC News on behalf of the Global Virus Network, not the FDA.)

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Using existing live vaccines, including the oral poliovirus vaccine, would not be a permanent solution, but rather a temporary fix that may buy time until a coronavirus vaccine hits the market, Chumakov said.

The protection would wane with time, but the beginning of an outbreak is an important time to keep the virus from spreading, said Chumakov, noting that unlike the vaccine for tuberculosis, there are three types of oral poliovirus vaccine that could be administered back-to-back as soon as the immunity-boosting effects of one wears off, potentially extending such temporary protection.

The potential protection from the vaccine remains hypothetical, however, which is why Chumakov and others are calling for clinical trials.

In places where its still used, the oral poliovirus vaccine is typically administered to babies and not adults, so scientists cant simply look at whether it already works to boost the immune system against other viruses in adults in these populations.

Chumakov referred to a three-year controlled trial conducted in Russia in the 1960s as the strongest evidence in support of using disease-specific vaccines to broadly ward off other viruses. In the study, which was conducted by Chumakovs mother, researchers concluded that giving adults doses of the oral poliovirus vaccine cut deaths due to seasonal influenza and acute respiratory diseases three-fold.

Chumakov and his co-authors also cite other studies and anecdotes in which an oral poliovirus vaccine has effectively prevented another strain of poliovirus, which the vaccine was not specifically designed to treat.

However, other experts in the field are skeptical that the polio vaccine would provide the needed boost, and view the existing research as flimsy at best.

I do believe the oral polio vaccine would provide some protection against new viruses, but so would catching cold, said Rachel Roper, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at East Carolina Universitys Brody School of Medicine. Catching any virus, she said, would set up the antiviral state associated with enhanced immunity.

Roper also expressed concern that administering a live vaccine that does not specifically target COVID-19 could create competition called immunodominance that prompts the immune system to target the live vaccine while leaving few resources to fight off COVID-19.

We wont see safety concerns until we test it in large trials that include a lot of people, Roper said.

Indeed, the oral polio vaccine shouldnt be given in an attempt to prevent COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial.

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Adam Lauring, an associate professor of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Michigan, said that if the oral poliovirus vaccine is proven to be effective, everyone would need to get the vaccine at the same time for it to work as planned, which would require a coordinated response with its own logistical challenges.

Theres also the issue of some people already having immune responses against some vaccines, which means this could impede some of the antibody responses we would want, said Lauring. In other words, the oral polio vaccine may not boost the immune system, as the theory proposes, in people who have already received a polio vaccine.

Its a good idea, but we dont know how it would pan out. There is some epidemiological evidence that is a sign that its something worth looking into, he said.

Chumakov estimates that it would cost $13 million to vaccinate the entire U.S. population, a relatively cheap solution if it works, and could provide a leg-up on future pandemics.

This pandemic will go, but there will be another one. We will continue to get new and emerging diseases, and there will always be this dilemma of what do we do in the interim before we can develop a specific vaccine, Chumakov said. This is much bigger than just stopping COVID-19.

CLARIFICATION (June 12, 2020, 12:12 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article omitted Dr. Robert Gallo's title. He is the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

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Polio vaccine could give temporary protection against ...

You can count the R&D execs at AbbVie among the believers in Genmabs bispecific platform tech.

Moving beyond the Allergan buyout, AbbVie refocused on its cancer drug pipeline, shelling out $750 million in cash and promising up to $3.15 billion more in milestones 60% for development and regulatory goals to ally itself on a slate of 7 development and discovery programs.

At the front of the queue is the early-stage drug epcoritamab, a CD3xCD20 bispecific from its DuoBody collection. Theres also DuoHexaBody-CD37 and DuoBody-CD3x5T4. And then AbbVie gets to pick and choose from among the discovery work at Genmab for 4 more, with AbbVie adding in its own contributions in the pairing up to come.

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Moderna burnishes its PhIII-ready Covid-19 vaccine with promising mouse data which suggest one dose might be enough after all - Endpoints News

One plan for an efficacy trial that compares several COVID-19 vaccines calls for using mobile teams, rather than fixed sites, as was done in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with an experimental Ebola vaccine.

By Jon CohenJun. 12, 2020 , 1:35 PM

Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.

A Chinese company will turn to Brazil for help. The World Health Organization (WHO) is adopting a strategy forged in a war zone during an Ebola outbreak. And the Trump administration plans to lean on existing U.S. infrastructure for tackling HIV and flu. These are some of the disparate strategies about to be employed in the next and most important stage of the COVID-19 vaccine race: the large-scale, placebo-controlled human trials needed to prove which of the more than135 candidatesare safe and effective.

Two such efficacy trials plan to start next month, even as the United States and global initiatives struggle to answer major questions, from what it means for a COVID-19 vaccine to work to how to find enough people exposed to the virus so a candidate can be put to a real-world test. Populations that have high levels of viral transmission are a moving targetWuhan, China; Seattle; or Milan might once have been a good place to test the mettle of a vaccine, but no longer. And quickly enrolling tens of thousands of properly informed people who meet a trials entry criteria is a big lift, says Susan Buchbinder, an epidemiologist at the San Francisco Department of Public Health who runs vaccine trials.

Competition among trial efforts could hinder the global push, says Wayne Koff, who heads the nonprofit Human Vaccines Project and formerly led the HIV vaccine program at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Its absolutely extraordinary how much has been done in 6 months, but theres an old adage that everybody loves to collaborate unless they want to win. Others, however, dont anticipate conflicts, noting that scientists and officials are sharing information about trial designs and plans. Each one will contribute differently, says Ana Maria Henao Restrepo, the lead representative of WHOs vaccine effort, Solidarity. I dont see competition.

Winning, one of U.S. President Donald Trumps favorite terms, is the clear goal of Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. project that aims to start to vaccinate millions of Americans in October and offer shots to 300 million people in the United States by January 2021. After winnowing down vaccine candidates in an opaque process over the past month and committing what could be more than $2 billion to its top choices, Warp Speed plans to enter three to five of them into efficacy trials that will have harmonized protocols to streamline oversight and will run analyses in central labs so data can more easily be compared.

The first Warp Speed candidate to launch is Modernas vaccine, composed of messenger RNA encoding the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The candidates efficacy trial, announced by the company on 11 June, will enroll 30,000 people and take place primarily at U.S. hospitals and universities long used for HIV and flu vaccine testing and now overseen by Warp Speeds COVID-19 Prevention Network. But which of those brick-and-mortar sites will have enough SARS-CoV-2 circulating near them to quickly produce an efficacy signal is uncertain given the shifting distribution of new cases in the United States.

China has an even starker problem: Theres currently no transmission to speak of in the country, which has forced Sinovac Biotech, a company based in Beijing, to stage efficacy trials of its vaccine candidate in Brazil, where the COVID-19 epidemic is now raging. With a product composed of the entire virus that the company has inactivated with chemicals, Sinovac announced this week it is collaborating with the Butantan Institute, a major research institution in So Paulo that manufactures vaccines. We are working very hard to start the trial in July, says Sinovac Senior Director Meng Weining.

WHO proposes a different solution for Solidaritys efficacy trials. The agency hasnt yet announced which candidates Solidarity will test, but, unlike Warp Speedwhich wont consider Chinese-made vaccinesit is open to products from every country and has made public detailed criteria for how it will prioritize vaccines. To cope with the patchiness of the pandemic, Solidarity will adopt a strategy Henao Restrepo helped develop for Ebola vaccine trials in Guinea in 2015 and, 3 years later, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): setting up vaccination teams that can quickly mobilize to localized outbreaks.

We did this in Congo despite the war, Henao Restrepo says. Its not the traditional way, and some people think that we are crazy, but we have done it not once but twice. In the DRC, about 20 teams with 15 members each drove around the affected regions and set up temporary sites, vaccinating and following more than 300,000 people.

Warp Speed, which could if needed expand its trials to international sites used for HIV drug and vaccine testing, also plans to form surge clinics to quickly recruit people in rural U.S. areas with big outbreaks or industrial pockets of high transmission such as meat-packing plants. Models driven by machine learning will help Warp Speed forecast where infection will be highest, says Peter Gilbert, a University of Washington, Seattle, biostatistician. There are risk predictors that account for space and geography and features that are more constant like race, ethnicity or preexisting conditions, Gilbert says. Its really complicated.

One of the trickiest issues for trial designers is deciding what, exactly, represents success for a COVID-19 vaccine. Is it an infection endpoint, a transmission endpoint, preventing moderate disease, or preventing severe disease? Koff asks.

There was a lot of debate on that question, for Warp Speed, notes John Mascola, who heads NIAIDs Vaccine Research Center and contributes to the project. A COVID-19 vaccine that fails to prevent infection might still provide great benefit if it reduces symptomatic disease, so Warp Speed and Solidarity both ultimately chose that as the primary endpoint of the trials. Trial volunteers who develop fever, headache, dry cough, or other symptoms linked to COVID-19 will be tested for SARS-CoV-2, to see whether more people with confirmed infections develop symptomatic disease in the placebo arm of the trial than among those who received the vaccine.

To detect an efficacy signal, both Warp Speed and Solidarity estimate they will need to give each vaccine to 15,000 to 20,000 people in a population that has a 1% incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection. If the vaccine prevents COVID-19 symptoms at least 50% of the time, its efficacy should be clear in 6 months, after about 150 infections have accumulated in the trial.

Both efforts will pit multiple vaccine candidates head to head. One difference is that Solidarity plans to compare all its vaccines against a shared placebo group, an approach that reduces the number of volunteers the researchers need to recruit and follow. In the Solidarity trial, the philosophy is we have to make this thing really simple, says Gilbert, who has worked with this effort, too. Solidarity trial sites have the option to do substudies of more detailed questions, but those are built into Warp Speeds trials. Specifically, Warp Speed will do repeated blood draws and nasal/throat swabs to evaluate immune responses and viral levels to better understand why vaccines succeed or how they might affect transmission.

In addition to Solidarity, WHO is helping the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, another global effort that may stage its own vaccine efficacy trials if companies do not want to participate in Solidarity. Companies may or may not be very enthusiastic about head-to-head comparisons, explains Soumya Swaminathan, WHOs chief scientist and top liaison to the ACT Accelerator. And the ACT Accelerator has pockets as deep as Warp Speed: Countries and philanthropies in May pledged $8 billion, with a commitment that it would equitably distribute any proven COVID-19 productsvaccines, treatments, diagnosticsto rich and poor alike.

Buchbinder is impressed by the speed at which these massive efforts have gotten underway. Its unlike any other research Ive undertaken, she says. But she and others are careful to temper expectations. Even though she will oversee a Warp Speed trial site, for example, she doubts the U.S. effort will meet Trumps goal of having a proven vaccine by October. Koff agrees; the failures of so many HIV vaccine trials have sobered him, he says. We need to be really careful how we manage expectations, he concludes.

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'It's really complicated.' United States and others wrestle with putting COVID-19 vaccines to the test - Science Magazine

It wont be enough to find a vaccine that works against COVID-19. Scientists will then need to quickly make enough vaccine for hundreds of millions perhaps billions of people.

One San Diego biotechs solution to this manufacturing challenge? A vaccine that makes more of itself.

TriLink Biotechnologies is working with researchers at Imperial College London to test such a vaccine in a trial slated to begin in mid-June. If successful, the approach could help get a COVID-19 vaccine to a wide swath of the population quickly, says Anton McCaffrey, TriLinks director of emerging science and innovation.

Right now, everybody wants to go at warp speed, McCaffrey said. You need to know that you can make (a vaccine) at the scale thats required to vaccinate a substantial part of the population.TriLinks vaccine uses genes that viruses normally rely on to copy their genetic material. Only this time, those genes help copy a vaccine that focuses the immune systems attention on the surface of the novel coronavirus. After copying itself over the course of a couple weeks, the vaccine would eventually be cleared from a persons system, according to McCaffrey.

The viral genes that allow the vaccine to copy itself also make it larger and trickier to produce, but scientists wouldnt need to make as much. The company estimates that the approach reduces the amount of vaccine each person would need by 25- to 50-fold.

Because a self-replicating vaccine copies itself in the same way that a virus does, it would set off the same alarm bells triggered by infection. That could be a good thing, McCaffrey says, as an antiviral response would lead to a stronger immune counterattack.

That will need to be shown by clinical trials. Imperial College researchers will begin a Phase 1 clinical trial to test the vaccines safety in mid-June. If that goes well, UK scientists will run a larger trial testing whether the vaccine protects against COVID-19.

TriLink can make enough vaccine for the clinical trials. But McCaffrey says that it would need to build new facilities or license out its technology to make enough vaccine for global use.

TriLink Biotechnologies employs about 200 people and was founded in San Diego in 1996.

San Diego biotech Arcturus Therapeutics is exploring a similar COVID-19 vaccine strategy in partnership with Singapores national health authority.

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San Diego biotech to help with trial of COVID-19 vaccine that makes more of itself - The San Diego Union-Tribune

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Milken Institute, the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, and First Person, a San Francisco design and storytelling company, together tell the urgent story of the global race for a COVID-19 vaccine in a newly released interactive experience at: https://www.covid-19vaccinetracker.org/.

Developed by First Person, the web-based tool is the culmination of a nearly three-month long effort tracking treatment and vaccines candidates for COVID-19 undertaken by FasterCures, a center of Milken Institute. When it first launched, FasterCures identified 38 vaccine candidates. As of today, there are 161 vaccines in development, with 10 in clinical trials.

Developing a safe vaccine that can be widely accessed is both necessary and extraordinarily complex, said Esther Krofah, Executive Director at FasterCures. We are thrilled that First Person has been able to bring our comprehensive vaccine tracker to life in a way that educates the public and gives the medical research community a new tool to better understand the race toward a COVID-19 vaccine.

The interactive platform is updated regularly and takes the viewer through a narrative including:

"Our intent with this project was to answer the question of how long it would take to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, said Drew Fiero President and CEO of First Person. The comprehensive, neutral, and consistently updated data from FasterCures allowed us to leverage our storytelling capabilities to do just that through a visually compelling, interactive experience.

Compiled from more than 30 publicly available data sources, the COVID-19 Treatment and Vaccine Tracker is updated daily by FasterCures. The nonprofit welcomes input on new treatments and vaccines in development. Please email COVID19@milkeninstitute.org with tips.

About FasterCures

FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute, is working to build a system that is effective, efficient, and driven by a clear vision: patient needs above all else. We believe that transformative and life-saving science should be fully realized and deliver better treatments to the people who need them.

About the Milken Institute

The Milken Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that helps people build meaningful lives, in which they can experience health and well-being, pursue effective education and gainful employment, and access the resources required to create ever-expanding opportunities for themselves and their broader communities. For more information, visit http://www.milkeninstitute.org

About First Person

First Person is a San Francisco design and storytelling company. We combine brilliant ideas with business insight to develop stories that leverage design and technology to deliver lasting value. The result is engaging media that informs, surprises and delights. For more information, visit http://www.firstperson.is

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Milken Institute Teams with First Person to Explain the Race to a COVID-19 Vaccine - Business Wire

Third of Americans Say They Won't Get a COVID-19 Vaccine, with Black Americans the Most Skeptical  Newsweek

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Third of Americans Say They Won't Get a COVID-19 Vaccine, with Black Americans the Most Skeptical - Newsweek