It’s going to take a lot longer to make a COVID-19 vaccine than a treatment
2Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/28/21156385/covid-coronavirus-vaccine-treatment-moderna-remdesivir-research
Reported today in The Verge.
It's going to take a lot longer to make a COVID-19 vaccine than a treatment
Scientists and drug companies are racing to develop and test treatments and vaccines that address COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Work on both is progressing at an unprecedented speed - but researchers are starting essentially from scratch on vaccine development, so the process is going to take a long time. Treatments, on the other hand, were further along when the outbreak started and might be available sooner.
"They're in vastly different situations right now," says Florian Krammer, a professor and vaccine development expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Both treatments and vaccines are important for a robust and effective response to the outbreak. Treatments help people after they already have a disease; in the case of COVID-19, researchers hope to treat the around 15 percent of COVID-19 patients who have non-mild symptoms. Vaccines, on the other hand, help prevent people from getting sick in the first place.
Scientists started work on drugs to treat coronaviruses during the SARS and MERS outbreaks, but because the outbreaks died down, the job was never completed. Now, they're able to dust off that old research and start building on it. The leading candidate is a drug called remdesivir, which was developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead. Research showed that it could block SARS and MERS in cells and in mice. In addition, remdesivir was used in a clinical trial looking for treatments for Ebola - and therefore, it had already gone through safety testing to make sure it doesn't cause any harm.
That's why teams in China and the US were able to start clinical trials testing remdesivir in COVID-19 patients so quickly.