virus and the pandemic it's caused impacting lives physically financially

and socially billions of people are social distancing and while we do our

part to combat the spread of the disease researchers are working endlessly to

produce a sustainable and reliable vaccine to finally end this crisis as

we've seen in the news there are teams globally working on vaccine solutions

and as of April 8th there are 115 vaccine candidates in varying stages of

research every day there seems to be a new development private companies like

moderna and inovio are making headlines as they're quickly progressing in the

first stages of the vaccine approval process a process that usually takes

years is being pushed in a matter of new months and that's the question with

urgency looming how viable are many of these fast vaccines and are we going to

have a vaccine solution within a year short answer a very apprehensive may be

so with everything by everybody in every place works perfectly could you

theoretically accomplish this in 18 months

I think it's optimistically 12 to 18 months under normal circumstances it

takes five to ten years to develop a vaccine it is a process designed to be

appropriately slow reflective evidence-based peer reviewed by other

scientists and then used in under normal circumstances taking vaccines from the

lab to licensing for public distribution not only takes time but money roughly 1

billion dollars worth or more but a large part of the acceleration of the

vaccines were hearing about have to do with an international organization that

launched in 2017 called the Coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations or

SETI the thing about these vaccines is that you need to have funding to move

from one stage to the next Zika disappeared so they took the money

away Ebola disappear so no money you have you have to get out

of that cycle so actually sepia merged because they

knew that this was a problem what would we do if something big came up and of

course it's a good thing they planned because something big did come up and

that's why Sethi had the funding available immediately to give to

organizations like Madera nikeyra back in ovo in Queensland and while the

funding helps to speed up the process the teams chosen by sepi also are

already ahead in their vaccine research teams either have experience with

previous outbreaks like MERS we're working on novel vaccine methods that

could significantly reduce the development timeline but before we get

carried away with how these new research platforms work we should know the

vaccine basics essentially a vaccine can be made in a few different ways we have

inactivated and live attenuated both known as whole pathogen vaccines subunit

vaccines including recombinant polysaccharide and conjugate vaccines

which are using a piece of the pathogen or the newer method of nucleic acid

vaccines using the DNA or RNA of the pathogen when injected into our body's

vaccines all aimed to mimic the infectious agent typically a vaccine is

often given with an adjuvant to boost the initial immune response after the

injection this response sounds the alarm in our body and begins the organization

of white blood cells like killer T cells and specific proteins called antibodies

killer T cells destroy the pathogen and the infected cells and the antibodies

neutralize the pathogen in SARS CoV to s case the antibodies head toward the

recognizable spike proteins on the outer shell of the corona virus and block the

proteins from connecting to the receptors of our cells this whole

process helps the body's immune system get trained by the vaccine and retain

the memory of the infection so that when a vaccinated person encounters a real

virus like SAR Co b2 they can quickly recover so basically your body comes up

with the preventative measures it needs to fight the pathogen we just need to

initiate that exposure in the old days we would just grind up the virus or the

bacteria and kill it with formalin or heat and inject it into animals and

sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't as we've

gotten more sophisticated now we can use molecular biology to either make these

tiny little proteins or to make particles that look like the virus or

you can make DNA or RNA vaccines all of these things have a potential to work so

which ones are set be focusing on well right now they have a number of funded

vaccine candidates in their portfolio but out of those funded platforms we're

hearing mostly about four of them to mRNA vaccines from moderna and cure back

one DNA vaccine from inovio and a protein vaccine from Australia's

University of Queensland there are no licensed DNA or RNA vaccines on the

other hand we believe that they can be made rapidly I mean I think you heard

inovio say that within three hours of seeing the sequence they had designed

the vaccine that they intended to take into humans it takes longer for protein

vaccine it takes longer for a whole inactivated virus vaccine that every

group is pursuing what it does best given the urgency of finding a vaccine

during this pandemic we're looking for new approaches like DNA and RNA vaccines

because they can be developed quickly however that doesn't mean that work on

other promising solutions stops as experts are advocating for a multi prong

approach when it comes to developing vaccines because we'll need as many

candidates as we can to pass the rigorous approval phases but what

exactly are these phases well for example once a viable coronavirus

vaccine candidate has been identified in preclinical studies they can move on to

the highly-anticipated phase one of the approval process space one studies

involve tens of people the moderna mRNA vaccine that's being

tested in the US will enroll forty five people and what you're doing there is

you're again looking to see does it produce an immune response and does it

appear to be safe now you only have tens of people so you won't see very much

once that hurdle is passed we can enter Phase two where the study enrolls

hundreds of patients now you're getting more refined in what doe

how to administer it how many doses you're looking again for immunogenicity

you might get some hints about effectiveness and you're looking for

safety and so phase two can actually be a fairly long time because you're

testing multiple things you're looking at your results because really the cost

of failure for large companies is huge that distance between phase 2 and phase

3 is somewhat affectionately called the valley of death and the reason for it is

the vast majority of vaccines and drugs will not make it into or past phase 3

but let's say a corona virus vaccine it does pass if so it will go into phase 3

where thousands to tens of thousands of people are enrolled in a trial now what

you're looking at is efficacy does it actually work not just raising the

immune response but does it actually prevent disease from here the FDA

scrutinizes the data collected across all three phases if it all looks good

then they give the final approval on licensing and manufacturing whew we did

it it only took hundreds of hours of

vaccine development three major clinical trials and hundreds of thousands of

people plus a number of approval committees so by now you're probably

wondering how do we telescope something that is five to ten years into something

that may be 12 to 18 months so you do face two very close to Phase one maybe

overlapping it partially and then you see that you get the right protective

responses in the laboratory and rather than waiting until you've got all the

data to the very end of the trial you may wait a month to make sure that the

best responses are present and then based on those best responses either the

company or maybe sepi or a government will say okay fine let's move on to see

if this actually protects very quickly again if everything goes right and we

see no safety signals it would be possible it may be longer and so we're

going to have to get ready for co-ed 19 and living with it and figuring how to

work around it okay so best-case scenario we're looking

at 12 to 18 months before we have a viable

vaccine but even if this ambitious timeline is accomplished researchers

will need to find the means of being factoring it but there's some 8 billion

people on our planet but if they overcome all these challenges we'd be

looking at a vaccine that was developed at a historical speed one with the

potential to save millions of lives Kovan 19 is a huge subject one that's

impacted each and every one of us if there's another aspect of it that you

want to see us cover please let us know in the comments below and make sure to

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see you next time