“There are no guarantees of success, but we hope this work could provide a significant and important step forward in developing a vaccine for this disease,” Richard Hatchett, CEO of the coalition, said in a statement.
One aspect the coalition is emphasizing is speed. Advances in genetic technologies and widespread cooperation among scientists around the world are enabling labs to analyze the virus in near real-time.
In 2003, an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), a type of coronavirus that closely resembles the Wuhan variant, spread to more than two dozen countries and killed 774 people. At the time, it took scientists in the United States 20 months to advance from sequencing the virus’s genome to human trials of potential vaccines.
Hatchett is hoping to cut that process down to 16 weeks by investing in technologies to produce and test vaccines faster, and by applying research conducted on other coronaviruses that are thought to be closely related to the Wuhan pathogen.
Novavax, a biotech company headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, is also banking on the ability to apply lessons learned from previous vaccine development programs. The firm has worked on vaccines for the flu, in addition to pandemic-level outbreaks such as Ebola, SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, another type of coronavirus that was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012.
Gregory Glenn, head of research and development at Novavax, said the company’s previous work on coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS could help speed up vaccine development.
“We think we can get to a vaccine fairly quickly, so we felt like we had no choice,” he said.
For now, Novavax is investing internally in this research, but Glenn said the company would eventually need outside funding to continue through the various testing phases. Still, he thinks Novavax could mass produce millions of doses in a year if one of its experimental vaccines showed success in clinical trials.
But millions of doses would be insufficient to protect people in even just one country, particularly as officials are bracing for the virus to continue spreading.
Even the most state-of-the-art vaccine development can be a long and expensive process. If researchers can get an experimental vaccine to clinical trials in four months — a feat in and of itself — it would still likely take at least a year before those vaccines are commercially available.
So while vaccines are an extremely important way to prevent infectious diseases, they are not necessarily the most practical solution during an outbreak, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
“Every time we get an outbreak, there’s an outpouring of voices saying we’re going to have a vaccine,” he said. “I wish we had these vaccines, too, but transferring the Grand Canyon to the state of New York is probably more practical at this point.”
Osterholm said the approval process for new vaccines is lengthy and it’s more often the case that outbreaks have already receded by the time doses are commercially manufactured and available.
The SARS vaccines developed by Novavax, for instance, were never mass produced because public health officials were able to contain the virus. The outbreak ended after about six months, and according to the CDC, there have been no known transmissions since July 2003.
And though work on an Ebola vaccine has been in the works for decades, efforts were ramped up after a severe outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Still, the first Ebola vaccine was only recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December.
But Glenn said there is still value in investing in vaccine development early on during outbreaks, especially as technologies improve and scientists are able to be more agile with this type of research.
“We live in a time when there are so many tools available,” he said. “It has to be possible that we’ll crunch that time down from recognizing a novel virus to having a new vaccine. Even just two years from now, we should have this conversation again and see how we did.”
