Category: Covid-19 Vaccine

For a Halifax father and daughter dedicated to taking on global infectious diseases, the novel coronavirus has led to their latest, exhausting push to create tests and vaccines to save lives.

Alyson Kelvin, 39, and David Kelvin, 65, are once again in the trenches of a race to find long-term solutions, hoping for success while public interest and funding remain in place.

Alyson, a virologist working at Dalhousie University, has been seconded to the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization - International Vaccine Centre in Saskatoon since mid-February to test vaccines in lab animals.

Meanwhile, back in Halifax, her father a professor in Dalhousie's department of microbiology and immunology is immersed in creating a portable test kit to identify the severity of the illness for people who test positive for the virus.

Both are engaged in "rapid response" science, which has meant fast-tracked federal funding is paired with swift collaboration with scientists around the globe working on the pandemic.

"I work from waking up until going to sleep," the younger Kelvin said during an interview from Saskatoon. "My whole life has shifted. My husband and children are back in Halifax."

The pursuit of infectious disease solutions is a family passion, she adds.

"That's how I was raised," she says, referring to her observation of her father's work on HIV-AIDS as a young woman.

Her career has already included work on the first SARS outbreak, the Zika virus and various influenza outbreaks. Her father has worked on many of the same outbreaks.

David Kelvin has several projects on the go, including a push to identify "biomarkers" in this instance molecules that activate white blood cells that will indicate if a person who tests positive for the virus is at risk of developing a severe case of COVID-19.

The goal is to create a kit that would allow health care providers to determine in as little as 20 minutes who needs to be hospitalized, which could potentially keep vitally needed beds and respirators open for patients most in need.

"Rather than going through a lengthy process of days, we can do it rapidly and provide assistance to doctors who are looking at a surge of patients and can decide who should receive hospitalization at the earlier stages of the disease," he explained in an interview.

In Saskatoon, his daughter, accompanied by a doctoral student and technician from Dalhousie, is working with coronavirus investigator Darryl Falzarano at the International Vaccine Centre to carry out animal tests for potential vaccines.

Her knowledge of ferrets is key as the animal was identified as a helpful model for human immune reactions in the SARS outbreak in 2002-03, and is believed to also be a useful lab animal for testing vaccines for the novel coronavirus.

Her team is working with three vaccines developed by Halifax molecular virologist Chris Richardson, also a Dalhousie University scientist, and a vaccine developed by a scientist at the centre.

While their work has to move as swiftly as possible, she says that doesn't mean compromising a meticulous methodology to avoid any safety risks. Without animal-testing stages in vaccine research, it's possible errors can occur, she said.

"It's especially important because the original SARS vaccines weren't effective and sometimes led to more severe disease in the end. So, this is an important stage of the evaluation," she said.

Having vaccines a year from now for the novel coronavirus may still be vital, the researcher said.

"We may see waves of it in the same way we do with influenza .... Having a vaccine and being ready for this particular virus could help us if that becomes a reality," she said.

Richardson, who has worked in the field for four decades, said regular vaccine research can take several years.

"Typically it could be two years and clinical trials can go even further," he said in an interview.

He says one of the frustrations is that funding can dry up after an outbreak prompts an initial surge in interest. The veteran virologist said he hopes it will be different this time.

The father and daughter both say they are relying on Ottawa to keep funding flowing in the months to come, even if the pandemic calms.

"This call for the initial research was $1 million," David Kelvin said. "It's a fantastic initial start. We realize and know that to continue this through the full duration of the infection cycle, we're going to have to have a lot more investment."

He's hopeful the biomarkers for the potential test kits will emerge from his collaborators in China and Italy in four to 10 weeks, but further work will then require commercial collaborators interested in producing the kits.

The family connections in the research are likely to continue. Alyson Kelvin said that as her father's team's kits evolve, her team will be able to test their effectiveness.

"We can experimentally induce viral infection and disease, and we can evaluate the kits using samples from our experiments before they're used in people," she said.

Amid the current pressure for results, David Kelvin says it may be time for government to reflect on whether the funding for vaccine research should have been in place sooner and on a steadier basis.

Too often, he says, interest has faded when the worst of an international infection passes.

"We need to impress on everyone this is our third pandemic in 20 years," he said. "We don't want to respond in an emergency fashion every time. We want to be really well prepared."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 15, 2020.

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Father and daughter virologists working on vaccine for COVID-19 - National Observer

Pharmaceutical giant Sanofi is exploring two treatments for the novel coronavirus, including a vaccine that may be produced at the companys Swiftwater plant in the Pocono region if proven successful.

Last month, Sanofi announced that it was joining forces with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in order to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, the virus that has killed 25 Americans and affected at least 647 more according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Inovio Pharmceuticals in Plymouth Meeting is also working on a vaccine.

According to a release from the company, Sanofi Pasteur will utilize previously developed work for a SARS vaccine "which may unlock a fast path forward for developing a COVID-19 vaccine."

Sanofi has teamed up with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, in order to develop the vaccine.

"Addressing a global health threat such as this newest coronavirus is going to take a collaborative effort, which is why we are working with BARDA to quickly advance a potential vaccine candidate," David Loew, global head of vaccines at Sanofi, said. "While we are lending our expertise where possible, we believe the collaboration with BARDA may provide the most meaningful results in protecting the public from this latest outbreak."

Sanofi will use its recombinant DNA platform, which produces an exact genetic match to proteins found on the surface of the virus, to develop the vaccine. According to the company, "the DNA sequence encoding this antigen will be combined into the DNA of the baculovirus expression platform, the basis of Sanofis licensed recombinant influenza product," and be used to produce large quantities of the coronavirus antigen, which can then be developed to stimulate the immune system to protect against COVID-19.

"Emerging global health threats like the 2019 novel coronavirus require a rapid response," BARDA Director Rick A. Bright said. "By expanding our partnership with Sanofi Pasteur and leveraging a licensed recombinant vaccine platform, we hope to speed development of a vaccine candidate to protect against a new virus."

The company noted that in nonclinical studies, the SARS vaccine candidate provided partial protection in animal models. The development work by Protein Sciences, a company acquired by Sanofi in 2017, gives Sanofi a head start on a COVID-19 vaccine. Thanks to the fact that the new vaccine would be based on the SARS platform, the company may be able to pursue research and clinical testing faster than most other pharmaceutical entities.

If the vaccine proves successful, Sanofi will predominantly produce it at its manufacturing sites in Swiftwater and Pearl River, New York.

Furthermore, an existing medication produced by Sanofi could also prove useful in the fight against COVID-19.

"There is scientific rationale that supports the exploration of Kevzara (our rheumatoid arthritis medicine we have with Regeneron) to treat pulmonary complications related to COVID-19," Nicolas Kressman, Sanofis North American media relations contact, said in an email statement.

"Given the quickly evolving situation around COVID-19, we are working to leverage the knowledge of both companies (Sanofi and Regeneron) in evaluating how Kevzara may be a potential treatment option for some patients."

Treatments for COVID-19 cannot come soon enough, as the virus has infected over 115,000 people worldwide, killing more than 4,200 as of Wednesday morning.

Pennsylvanias Department of Health confirmed another three presumptive cases of COVID-19 in the commonwealth two residents of Bucks County and one from Montgomery County on Wednesday morning. The DOH noted that all of the patients are adults, and all are in isolation at home. This brings Pennsylvanias total to 15 cases, with 13 presumptive positive and two cases one from Delaware County and one from Wayne County having been confirmed by CDC testing.

Testing for the virus remains somewhat problematic, though. The CDC lists that its own laboratories have only tested 3,698 specimens, and U.S. public health laboratories have tested 4,856 as of March 9.

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Sanofi exploring possibility of COVID-19 vaccine that would be produced in Pa. - Bucks County Courier Times

Farmington-based CaroGen and scientists from Yale have begun work on a vaccine targeting the coronavirus responsible for the ongoing global outbreak of COVID-19 disease.

The team is basing its approach on previous work done by CaroGen co-founder and scientific chairman, John Rose, in the wake of the global SARS epidemic of 2003. The coronaviruses that cause SARS and COVID-19 are genetically similar.

Rose, who is director of the Yale School of Medicines molecular virology program, worked with others to develop a vaccine shown to be protective in animal models against the SARS virus.

The foundation for a novel COVID-19 vaccine was established in our laboratory over a decade ago, Rose said in a statement. We hope to select candidate(s) for human clinical studies within the next several months.

However, fully developing a vaccine and winning approval to use it in human patients could take three years, if everything goes well, CaroGen CEO Bijan Almassian told HBJ on Thursday.

Vaccine development and approval is longer and more expensive and the bar is higher, as they will be tested in healthy people, Almassian said.

Three years could be well past the peak of the current outbreak in the U.S., which some have estimated to occur this summer. However, Almassian said theres likely to be a need for a vaccine in the future.

It could possibly come back next winter after being silent during the summer, he said of the virus.

COVID-19 isnt the first outbreak that has spurred CaroGen to take action. The company, which is developing vaccines and immunotherapies for cancer and infectious diseases including hepatitis B, planned a collaboration with Yale and UConn in 2016 on a Zika virus vaccine, after a global outbreak that began the year prior.

The effort ultimately didnt have legs, Almassian said, citing steep competition from other Zika vaccine developers, a lack of funding, and the fact that the epidemic officially tailed off just weeks after the vaccine collaboration was announced.

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Farmington biotech teams with Yale to pursue COVID-19 vaccine - Hartford Business

'Where's the money?' Inside GeoVax, one lab working to create a COVID-19 vaccine  wgxa.tv

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'Where's the money?' Inside GeoVax, one lab working to create a COVID-19 vaccine - wgxa.tv

Researchers from left, Dr. Robert Kozak, Dr. Samira Mubareka and Dr. Arinjay Banerjee have isolated the agent responsible for the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19. Courtesy/McMaster University

From Homeland Security News Wire:

A team of researchers from Sunnybrook Health Science Center in Toronto,McMaster University, and theUniversity of Toronto(opens in a new window)has isolated severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the agent responsible for the ongoing outbreak ofCOVID-19.

Sunnybrook says that the team was able to culture the virus from two clinical specimens in a Level 3 containmentfacility.

We need key tools to develop solutions to this pandemic. While the immediate response is crucial, longer-term solutions come from essential research into this novel virus, saidDr. Samira Mubareka, microbiologist and infectious diseases physician atSunnybrook.

The isolated virus will help researchers in Canada and across the world develop better diagnostic testing, treatments, and vaccines, and gain a better understanding of SARS-CoV-2 biology, evolution, and clinicalshedding.

Researchers from these world-class institutions came together in a grassroots way to successfully isolate the virus in just a few short weeks, said Dr. Rob Kozak, clinical microbiologist at Sunnybrook. It demonstrates the amazing things that can happen when wecollaborate.

Dr. Arinjay Banerjee, NSERC post-doctoral fellow at McMaster University, said he knows the collaboration wont stopthere.

Now that we have isolated the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we can share this with other researchers and continue this teamwork, he said. The more viruses that are made available in this way, the more we can learn, collaborate andshare.

Friday, Paul Hodgson, associate director of business development at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization-International Vaccine Center in Saskatoon, confirmed to The Globe and Mail that the joint federal-provincial facility had quietly reached the same milestone a few weeks earlier and is now using its version of the virus for a vaccine developmenteffort.

Samples of the Saskatoon-derived version of the coronavirus are now available for approved research groups through the National Microbiological Laboratory in Winnipeg. The Ontario group also plans to generate its version fordistribution.

Medicago Produces Viable Covid-19 Vaccine Candidate

Medicago, a biopharmaceutical firm based in North Carolinas Research Triangle, announced Thursday that it has produced a Virus-Like Particle (VLP) of the novel coronavirus, marking the first step in Covid-19 vaccinedevelopment.

The vaccine candidate, produced in 20 days of receiving SARS-CoV-2 gene, will be subjected to preclinical testing for safety andefficacy.

Medicago is planning to launch human trials in July orAugust.

The company, leveraging its plant-based technology platform, is working on developing Covid-19 antibodies in alliance with the Infectious Disease Research Center at Laval University in Qubec,Canada.

Medicago has some experience in quickly developing tools for fighting pandemics. In 2009 the company generated a research-grade vaccine candidate against H1N1 in 19 days, and in 2015 it also produced an anti-Ebola monoclonal antibody cocktail.

See the article here:

Homeland Security News Wire: COVID-19 Virus Isolated Better Testing, Treatments, Vaccines Are Near - Los Alamos Daily Post

A decade ago, a group of chemists cooked up a compound they simply called 3a and that, in lab experiments, fought off a number of different viruses. One was a type of coronavirus.

Now, the descendant of that molecule Gilead Sciences remdesivir is being rushed to patients with infections from the novel coronavirus in hopes that it can reduce the intensity and duration of Covid-19 and ease the burden of the pandemic on health systems.

Remdesivir, in the spotlight as scientists and governments scramble to find a treatment for the disease, took a circuitous route to center stage. Born as a general antiviral candidate, researchers threw it at an array of viruses and saw where it stuck. It bounced along from Gileads labs to academic centers, nudged by both federal taxpayer dollars and support from the company. It kept turning up whiffs of potential in cells and animals infected by other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS, but these bugs werent causing sustained global crises. For years, Gilead was primarily focused on ushering remdesivir into trials and toward approval for a different kind of infection: Ebola.

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But theres nothing like a pandemic to break the emergency glass on all possible options.

Remdesivir is now being tested in five Covid-19 clinical trials that have been set up at breakneck speed. Its been delivered through a compassionate use program to some patients, including the first case in the United States. The first trial results are expected next month, though some analysts have already raised concerns about the prospects based on the drips of data emerging from a small number of patients.

Others hopes are high for the drug. As of now, there are no approved therapies for any coronavirus infection, and remdesivir is the farthest along in the development process of any candidate.

Theres only one drug right now that we think may have real efficacy, Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization said last month. And thats remdesivir.

Remdesivirs odyssey illuminates the complicated trajectory drugs can take as they are forged, refined, scrutinized, and moved into human studies. But its long, meandering path also underscores why drugs need to demonstrate their efficacy in these studies. The drug similarly had lofty expectations as an Ebola treatment, and strong data from animal studies to boot. But in a landmark trial that compared four experimental therapies and was published last year, two other treatments were shown to dramatically reduce deaths from the infection, while remdesivir faltered, producing less impressive survival benefits.

Drug discovery and development is usually a very long and tedious process and you could have many failures on the path to an approved product, Tomas Cihlar, Gileads vice president of virology, said in an interview with STAT.

As for remdesivirs chances in Covid-19, Cihlar said: It would be wonderful if it works. But it needs to be proven.

When the patient with the first known U.S. case of Covid-19 was admitted to Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Wash., on Jan. 20, he wasnt all that sick.

The 35-year-old man had the respiratory infections most common symptoms of fever and cough, but had no trouble breathing and no evidence of pneumonia inflammation of the lungs air sacs. But around that time, his doctors saw a report from China that detailed that some patients there developed more severe symptoms several days into their illnesses.

That perked our ears to the worsening of this disease, said George Diaz, the infectious disease section chief at the hospital.

Within a few days, the man who had visited family in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak is believed to have started, and returned home to Washington Jan. 15 started experiencing shortness of breath and requiring oxygen. An X-ray revealed pneumonia.

Diaz informed officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with whom he had been conferring daily, that the patient was taking a turn for the worse. The CDC suggested trying an experimental drug, and mentioned Gileads remdesivir.

Hospital officials got in touch with Gilead about providing the drug, and then got the approval from the Food and Drug Administration to treat the patient through a compassionate use program, which allows unapproved drugs to be given under select circumstances outside of clinical trials. Gilead overnighted the drug to the hospital.

Treatment with intravenous remdesivir was initiated on the evening of day 7, and no adverse events were observed, the medical team wrote in a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The man started feeling better the following day.

We were aware that he was the first patient on the planet getting the drug for this infection, so we were super interested to see, hopefully, if he would improve, Diaz recalled.

The apparent success in one patient does not prove the drug is effective. That is where the large trials that will compare remdesivir to placebos come in.

Remdesivir has been able to advance into clinical studies so quickly for two key reasons. For one, thanks to its use in Ebola, it was known to be generally safe in humans. And two, it had a large body of preclinical evidence that is, data from studies in cells in lab experiments and in infected animals that indicated it could temper coronavirus infections. One study published just last month by researchers from Gilead and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases showed remdesivir inhibited the replication of MERS, a related coronavirus, in infected monkeys.

Much of this preclinical research has been conducted through collaboration among the National Institutes of Health, academic labs, and Gilead, steered by the Antiviral Drug Discovery and Development Center, or AD3C. The center is an NIH-funded program run out of the University of Alabama at Birmingham that, since 2014, has been on the hunt for new treatments for emerging viruses.

Since drug screens revealed that remdesivir had potential as a coronavirus fighter, it was routed into the arm of AD3C focused on this family, a project led by Mark Denison at Vanderbilt University and Ralph Baric at University of North Carolina. Starting in about 2015 and with the backing of Gilead, they and scientists in their labs have pulled back the curtain on how exactly remdesivir curtails coronaviruses and demonstrated that it can block the viruses from multiplying in infected animals.

The researchers got an additional NIH grant to ready remdesivir for clinical trials, and thought the target could be MERS, which has caused 858 deaths and nearly 2,500 cases, mostly in Saudi Arabia, since it started infecting people in 2012. But even with that focus, they were also thinking about how the drugs they were studying could be used for the next spillover when a virus jumps from animals to people.

Weve always thought that coronaviruses were a family on the move, said Tim Sheahan, a UNC coronavirus expert.

Even with that expectation, though, the researchers who have toiled away for years on these projects without much fanfare find themselves caught off guard now.

People like me, people doing basic science, oftentimes the work that were doing has no obvious direct translation to improving human health, Sheahan said. Its hard to imagine that the work weve done in a lab in North Carolina could be saving peoples lives around the world. Its incredibly gratifying, but its surprising and unusual for someone like me to experience this.

But if remdesivir had hopes as an Ebola treatment, how can it also work against coronaviruses? Their viral families are so different, its like saying a giraffe versus an elephant, said Gene Olinger, a former U.S. Army Ebola researcher, who is now the scientific advisor at MRI Global, a nonprofit research organization.

The trick is that remdesivir does not go after the virus directly. Instead, it targets the system the virus uses to replicate itself, hijacking it like you would your offices copy machine as part of a company-wide prank.

These viruses have a genome that consists of a strand of RNA. To make copies of themselves, they rely on a molecule called a polymerase to string together the individual building blocks of the viral genome. These are like the letters that we think of composing DNA.

Remdesivir is an analog, designed to mimic the appearance of one of the RNA letters, adenosine. It looks so similar that the polymerase can unknowingly pick it up instead of the real adenosine and insert it into the strand of viral genome thats being constructed, like bringing home the wrong twin from summer camp. Once in place, the analog acts as a cap, preventing any additional pieces from being strung on. This leaves the strand short of the full genome. The virus cant go on to replicate or infect other cells.

The polymerase grabs it almost accidentally and uses it in place of adenosine, said Maria Agostini, a postdoctoral researcher in Denisons Vanderbilt lab. The polymerase can kind of get it mixed up sometimes.

The drug can inhibit coronaviruses as well as Ebola because their polymerases are similar enough that its cloak-and-dagger operation fools them all. (Remdesivir does not appear to work on other viruses with more unrelated forms of polymerase.)

Like a bad song clears out a dance floor, remdesivir can clear the viral levels in a person, as long as it can interrupt enough replication. The key, researchers say, is that it has to be delivered somewhat early in an infection, as the virus is still proliferating. In patients who develop severe disease, its not the virus thats always the main problem. The bodys own immune system can react by heading into overdrive and causing secondary complications like organ damage. An antiviral cant head that off once its begun.

If you wait to treat someone until theyre in the ICU on a ventilator, its too late, youre not going to do a darn thing, said Richard Whitley, an infectious disease expert at UAB who coordinates the antiviral consortium.

When remdesivir stumbled in the Ebola trials last year, it was a disappointment, Gileads Cihlar acknowledged. But he argued it refocused the companys attention to other targets for the drug.

They didnt have to wait long.

In December, reports popped up from Wuhan of mysterious pneumonia cases. In early January, word came of a new coronavirus. At that point, we started getting ready, Cihlar said.

And when Chinese scientists published the virus genome, Gilead zeroed in on the portion that contained the recipe for the replication machinery the polymerase. They saw it was nearly identical to the version in SARS evidence that remdesivir might work against this virus as well. That was a really strong signal for us, he said.

There are now five clinical trials of remdesivir in Covid-19: two run by Chinese scientists, one looking at severe infections, and one at mild and moderate infections; one sponsored by NIAID; and two sponsored by Gilead in countries around the world with a large number of cases, looking at different disease severities and dosing regimens.

If the drug is successful in trials, most antiviral experts think the drug should primarily be used for patients with more severe symptoms and those who are hospitalized some 15% to 20% of cases. But observers have also raised a number of points that could potentially trip up the trials. For one, the process moved so quickly that analysts have wondered if the best doses were chosen. They have also pointed to the fact that one of the Chinese trials includes patients whose symptoms started up to 12 days prior. There are concerns that might be too late.

The overall trial might not be as spectacular as people think, Umer Raffat, an analyst at Evercore ISI, said in a presentation last week. But, Raffat added, results from patients who start treatment early might show the drug has efficacy if given soon after symptoms arise.

Another detail that will be scrutinized: Can the drug, which is given intravenously into the bloodstream, reach the cells it needs to clear the respiratory infection?

We dont know if the amount of remdesivir thats going to get into the lungs is enough to get the virus down, said Andre Kalil, an infectious disease specialist at University of Nebraska Medical Center and an investigator in the NIAID-sponsored trial. This is part of the reason were doing the study.

Remdesivir may have had a head start, but other efforts are underway to come up with Covid-19 treatments. (These are separate from vaccine projects.) Virologists said they were keeping an eye on a candidate pursued by researchers at Vanderbilt, UNC, and Emory University that, in its various forms, has been identified as NHC, EIDD-2801, and EIDD-1931. The drug company Regeneron, which steered its Ebola antiviral to success in the same trial in which remdesivir stumbled, is working on a treatment, as are other biopharma companies. Some experts have proposed using antibody-containing blood from survivors of Covid-19 as a therapy.

If remdesivir does succeed in clinical trials, Gilead will only face a new round of questions.

The company has run into a buzzsaw of public and governmental criticism in the past over the cost of its HIV and hepatitis C antivirals, and any drug approved to treat Covid-19 will certainly face pricing scrutiny. A Gilead spokesperson said the company was not discussing pricing yet.

Health authorities are already stressing the importance of access to therapeutics that do make it to market.

We cannot have a situation where people who need the drug dont get it and people who dont need the drug do, Mike Ryan, who leads the WHOs emergency program, said at a briefing this month when asked about the ongoing clinical trials. We must find ways to ensure we can scale up production of any drugs that prove effective and we can ensure that those drugs are distributed on the basis of need and the basis of benefit.

That points to another challenge Gilead could face with an approval for remdesivir: supply. Even if it was recommended only for people with severe infections who are hospitalized, that could still amount to thousands of patients needing doses, and needing them soon.

On a call with analysts this month, Gilead CEO Daniel ODay said the company was engaging our manufacturing and supply chain in the event of success and said that it was already talking with partners about increasing production of remdesivir. But given that the drug is still in trials, he said, right now the demand is really unknown.

That same day, ODay appeared at the White House with other drug and vaccine makers.

Were moving as fast as we can, ODay told President Trump as he described remdesivir. I think everybody around the table is moving as fast as we can.

Trump had a simple message for ODay: Get it done, Daniel. Dont disappoint us, Daniel.

Read the original here:

With the coronavirus, drug that once raised global hopes gets another shot - STAT

Senior health officials have said a COVID-19 vaccine will take at least two years to develop even with expedited clinical trials and approvals. The virus has affected 74 people in the country, including 17 foreign nationals (16 Italians and a Canadian).

Raman. R. Gangakhedkar, head of the Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases-I (ECD-I), Division of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), said Indian scientists have managed to successfully isolate the COVID-19 virus. This is needed for making a vaccine. There are two ways of going for vaccine preparation either you look at the sequences of the gene which then may lead to development of antibodies, or you actually have the strain and then you try to develop a vaccine which is always an easier option, he said.

Dr. Gangakhedkar said the COVID-19 virus is difficult to isolate.

But the efforts of Indian scientists have been successful and about 11 isolates are available which is a prime requisite for doing any kind of research related to viruses, he said.

He cautioned that in certain viruses even if vaccines are given, when the infection tends to occur, there could be a flare-up and the severity of the infection is likely to increase. This is an evolving virus and we are still learning about it. We would say right now we must try to prevent it as much as possible, contain it and wait for things to happen.

Asked if high temperature kills the virus, a senior health officials said there is no study or evidence to suggest that.

He said those avoiding quarantine are not only risking their life but also that of the loved ones in their family. The ICMR will start surveillance to examine whether any infected person has been left undetected.

So far there is no evidence that we are missing any cases, he said.

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COVID-19 vaccine will take at least two years to develop: health officials - The Hindu

As scientists race to develop treatments and vaccines for the COVID-19 virus, one facility in London is looking for volunteers to be infected with a coronavirus to help with research.

hVIVO, an arm of a pharmaceutical company based in the U.K. capital, is looking for 24 people to be infected with common strains of a member of the large coronavirus family of pathogens which the new coronavirus is also a member of.

The bug isn't the same as the COVID-19 virus, but close enough for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to safely test vaccines and antiviral drugs to fight the new coronavirus on participants.

The volunteers will be paid 3,500 ($4,380) according to The Times. To qualify, they must be must be healthy, aged between 18-55 years old, non-smokers, and have a verifiable medical history, Cathal Friel, executive chairman of Open Orphan, the company of which hVIVO is a subsidiary, told Newsweek.

To keep participants safe, the team will use strains like OC43 and 229E, which have been widespread "for many years and cause only a mild cold-like respiratory illness" according to a statement by hVIVO.

The catch? Participants must be comfortable with being quarantined for up to 14 days at the clinic.

The facility, known as FluCamp because of its usual focus on fighting the flu and common cold, has 24 hospital-like private rooms with en suite showers, toilets, and access to TV and WiFi. Participants must keep to a "strict" routine, and eat a nutritionally controlled diet and abstain for alcohol, smoking and exercise.

Friel stresses of the 3,000 volunteers to stay at FluCamp, none have had an adverse reaction, and the three to leave did so due to family emergencies.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 started in Wuhan, over 4,700 people worldwide have died in over 127,000 cases, according to a dashboard tracking the virus by Johns Hopkins University. More than 68,000 people who have tested positive for the virus have recovered.

Most of the deaths have occurred in Hubei, at over 3,000. The virus has spread to every continent except Antarctica, as shown in the Statista map below. There are currently no treatments or vaccines, and those who fall ill must manage their symptoms, which in severe cases requires hospital treatment.

World Health Organization advice for avoiding spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19)

Hygiene advice

Medical advice

Mask usage

The rest is here:

U.K. Scientists Paying People $4,000 to Get Infected with Coronaviruses - Newsweek

The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. Twice in our conversation he started to say something, then paused and said, Actually, let me start again. So its striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.

Containment is the first step in responding to any outbreak. In the case of COVID-19, the possibility (however implausible) of preventing a pandemic seemed to play out in a matter of days. Starting in January, China began cordoning off progressively larger areas, radiating outward from the city of Wuhan and eventually encapsulating some 100 million people. People were barred from leaving home, and lectured by drones if they were caught outside. Nonetheless, the virus has now been found in 24 countries.

Despite the apparent ineffectiveness of such measuresrelative to their inordinate social and economic cost, at leastthe crackdown continues to escalate. Under political pressure to stop the virus, last Thursday the Chinese government announced that officials in Hubei province would be going door-to-door, testing people for fevers and looking for signs of illness, then sending all potential cases to quarantine camps. But even with the ideal containment, the viruss spread may have been inevitable. Testing people who are already extremely sick is an imperfect strategy if people can spread the virus without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work.

Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. Its likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic, he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, about 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)

Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal diseasea fifth endemic coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, cold and flu season could become cold and flu and COVID-19 season.

At this point, it is not even known how many people are infected. As of Sunday, there have been 35 confirmed cases in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. But Lipsitchs very, very rough estimate when we spoke a week ago (banking on multiple assumptions piled on top of each other, he said) was that 100 or 200 people in the U.S. were infected. Thats all it would take to seed the disease widely. The rate of spread would depend on how contagious the disease is in milder cases. On Friday, Chinese scientists reported in the medical journal JAMA an apparent case of asymptomatic spread of the virus, from a patient with a normal chest CT scan. The researchers concluded with stolid understatement that if this finding is not a bizarre abnormality, the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging.

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Teams around the world -- including at least two labs in the Mountain West -- are racing to develop a vaccine against the new coronavirus.

A group at Colorado State University is working on ways to inactivate the virus, which is one option for developing a vaccine.

Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, a National Institutes of Health biomedical research facility, is also contributing to the vaccine race. Scientists there are studying exactly how the virus infects a host, and identifying which animals best mimic the disease in humans. Theyre also trying to answer the question of how long the new coronavirus can survive outside a host. (RML is also responsible for creating the coronavirus images you may have seen around the web).

The labs research earlier this year on a dozen monkeys showed that the antiviral drug remdesivir helped fend off infection with a different kind of coronavirus. People are now studying whether the drug could help against COVID-19, too.

Usually vaccines take a decade or more to develop. For this coronavirus, the repeat refrain is that itll probably take at least a year, though some are optimistic it could be sooner.

Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, told NPR he hopes itll be available potentially as early as this fall. The organization has pushed about $24 million to universities and pharmaceutical companies working on a COVID-19 vaccine.

Regardless of the exact timeline, public health officials say a vaccine could still be useful in controlling this outbreak.

Its fair to say that as the trajectory of the outbreak continues, many people in the United States will at some point in time -- either this year or next -- be exposed to this virus, Dr. Nancy Messonnier told reporters Monday. Messonier directs the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

And Dr. Anthony Fauci with the NIHs National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it was quite conceivable that the current coronavirus will go beyond just a season, and come back and recycle next year. In that case, we hope to have a vaccine.

There are a number of ways to make a vaccine. One option is to use a weakened form of the virus itself. Other options include using a killed version of the virus, using proteins that stick out from the virus surface, or using pieces of the virus DNA or RNA.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these approaches, said Ray Goodrich, executive director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at CSU.

For example, a vaccine made from a weakened virus creates an immune response strong enough that it doesnt require booster shots to maintain protection against the illness, but theyre also considered riskier for people with weakened immune systems. The other types of vaccine tend to require booster shots, but are considered safe for a broader group of people.

Goodrich said he and his colleagues are taking the route of the killed virus because we have a way to do this in a rapid and logistically practical fashion.

As the Colorado Sun has reported, Goodrichs team is experimenting with a method to inactivate the coronavirus that, as they wrote in the journal Transfusion, killed microscopic parasites, HIV and bacteria in infected animal blood.

If the vaccine is effective in providing what is called sterilizing immunity that is persistent and long-lasting, then we can scale up this process in a relatively rapid way, he said.

Alan Rudolph, CSUs vice president for research, said the method has been used to inactivate other coronaviruses and is already in use around the globe to clean blood.

We anticipate an 8-month period to get to human testing, he said.

This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUER in Salt Lake City, KUNR in Nevada, the OConnor Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Montana, and KRCC and KUNC in Colorado.

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