What scientists are working on to find a cure for coronavirus COVID-19 – ABC News

COVID-19 is caused by a new strain of coronavirus, which means no-one has any immunity when they are first exposed to it.

"With flus they're all derived from very similar types of viruses, whereas this is a new virus where everyone is naive to [it]," said evolutionary biologist Jemma Geoghegan of the University of Otago, who studies the emergence and evolution of viruses.

This means when it comes to cures for COVID-19, while scientists can draw on what we know about other viruses, in many ways they're starting from scratch.

Viral infections are often harder to cure than bacterial infections because you can't treat them with antibiotics, although antiviral medications are available for some infections.

Treatments might be used to alleviate the symptoms of your infection while your immune system is fighting the virus.

Conversely, vaccines are designed to prevent people getting infected in the first place.

They do this by imitating the infection, so that the body's immune system knows how to fight that particular infection and protect you against getting it in the future.

Here's what we know about how our bodies deal with COVID-19, and what's in the pipeline to cure it so far.

Australian researchers have found that our immune systems respond to this coronavirus in the same way as to influenza.

The immune cells that emerge in the blood before patients recover from COVID-19, are the same cells we see in people before they recover from the flu.

Researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity were able to work this out by looking at multiple blood samples from one of Australia's first patients diagnosed with COVID-19.

Importantly, the research published in Nature Medicine is "the first paper that shows the body can give immunity and fight back and recover", researcher Carolien van de Sandt said.

Based on their experience with influenza patients, it also allowed the researchers to accurately predict how long the patient would take to recover from COVID-19.

But it's still too early to tell whether contracting coronavirus once would give you immunity to prevent you catching it again.

However the research could also help in the development of a vaccine and other treatments to tackle COVID-19.

Early signs are promising, after Australian researchers this week revealed they are ready to begin clinical trials of a potential treatment for COVID-19 using two existing drugs.

The drugs in question are an older HIV drug and an anti-malaria drug called chloroquine, which is rarely used now as the malaria pathogen has become resistant to it.

"There's certainly positive signals either this HIV drug or this anti-malaria drug actually work really well against COVID-19," David Paterson, director of the Centre for Clinical Research at the University of Queensland, told The Project.

"We know that in the test tube and in the patients that have been studied so far they've been able to recover and there's no more evidence of virus in [their] system," Professor Patterson said.

The next step for this research is to compare the HIV, the malaria drug, and a combination of the two, to see what treatment is most effective.

This phase of the trial could be as short as three months, Professor Paterson said, but it would take longer to roll the treatment out in the community, if it did prove effective.

Worldwide, Chinese doctors are completing clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of a combination of two HIV drugs, lopinavir and ritonavir, at treating COVID-19, New Scientist reported.

They are also soon to start testing a drug called remdesivir which was originally developed for Ebola.

Lots of different groups around the world are working on possible COVID-19 vaccines.

"There are now 15 potential vaccine candidates in the pipeline globally using a wide range of technolog[ies]: mRNA, DNA, nanoparticle, synthetic and modified virus-like particles," said microbiologist Ian Henderson of the University of Queensland.

The US National Institutes of Health announced that they have funded phase 1 clinical trials of a potential COVID-19 vaccine, called mRNA-1273, which began this week.

The vaccine was able to be brought to clinical trials so quickly because researchers had already been working on a vaccine to protect against another coronavirus, which causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

While results from this first trial may be available within three months, it will still take at least a year and likely longer for a resulting vaccine to be widely available to the public.

Closer to home, last month Queensland researchers were ready to begin testing another potential COVID-19 vaccine on animals, and hope to then start human trials of it by the middle of the year.

But getting to clinical trials, and proving your vaccine is both safe and effective, isn't the only challenge scientists developing these vaccines face.

"The next challenge will be finding enough production capacity globally to produce these competing vaccines, at a scale that millions or even billions of people can be vaccinated," Professor Henderson said.

Which is why we're still hearing it will take at least 12 to 18 months, for a COVID-19 vaccine to be widely available.

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What scientists are working on to find a cure for coronavirus COVID-19 - ABC News