There are more than 70 vaccines for COVID-19 currently in development, with three leading candidates, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
All three – one from the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology with Hong Kong’s CanSino Bio and two from companies in the US – are currently undergoing human trials, a list published by WHO this weekend shows.
Another 67 vaccines, developed by scientists worldwide including teams from the UK, are also working towards trials in humans.
WHO’s list comes as the global death count from COVID-19, the illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, has passed 100,000.
Inovio Pharmaceuticals began human testing for its coronavirus vaccine, the second to enter such trials in the US, the company announced last week
‘Under WHO’s coordination, a group of experts with diverse backgrounds is working towards the development of vaccines against COVID-19,’ WHO said in a statement on Monday.
‘The group makes a call to everyone to follow recommendations to prevent the transmission of the COVID-19 virus and protect the health of individuals.’
The list shows Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, working together with Hong Kong’s CanSino Bio, are leading the charge with their vaccine, called Ad5-nCoV.
In a listing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, CanSino Bio said it plans to move to phase II clinical trials with the genetic engineered vaccine candidate in China ‘soon’.
Of the two US-based drugs companies, Massachusetts-based Moderna received regulatory approval to move to human trials last month, while Pennsylvania-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals began human trials last week.
The remaining 67 on WHO’s list are in preclinical evaluation at institutes including Osaka University in Japan, the University of Queensland, Australia, and the University of Oxford and Imperial College London.
The drug industry is hoping to shorten the time it takes to get a vaccine to market – usually about 10 to 15 years – to within the next year, Bloomberg reports.
But public health officials say it will still take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine – despite human trials beginning.
The University of Oxford team has previously said that it could have a vaccine ready to go as soon as September.
Researchers there are confident they can roll out a jab for the disease within the next eight months.
Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Oxford said her team is ‘80 per cent’ confident that their vaccine will work based on previous work with similar vaccines.
‘The best-case scenario is that by the autumn of 2020 we have the results about the effectiveness of the vaccine from a phase III trial and the ability to manufacture large amounts of the vaccine,’ University of Oxford researchers told the Telegraph.
They admitted that this time frame was ‘highly ambitious’ many things could get in the way of that target.
‘At the moment it is not possible to identify who has already been infected, and if the virus is spreading quickly throughout the population it might be difficult to find unexposed people to take part in the trial,’ they said.
Most of Inovio’s work focuses on HPV-associated cancers, but it also began developing a vaccine for MERS, a deadly coronavirus that emerged in 2012
‘Conducting trials after the peak subsides presents another problem, because so many people will have developed a natural immunity by then, and the amount of transmission will have dropped so that those who are still not immune will take longer to be exposed to the virus.’
The scientists warned they were still struggling to get funding to scale-up production of the potential drug so it can be issued to the masses.
Of the two US developers at the top of the WHO list, Inovio Pharmaceuticals has Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permission for a safety test of a vaccine against the new coronavirus in 40 healthy volunteers in Philadelphia and Missouri.
It gave its first dose of the experimental vaccine to participants on Monday, April 6.
Dozens of research groups across the world, including Massachusetts-based Moderna, have taken a different route to traditional vaccine techniques
Inovio’s approach is what’s called a DNA vaccine, made using a section of the virus’s genetic code packaged inside a piece of synthetic DNA.
While in March, the first safety test in people of a different vaccine candidate began in Seattle, developed by Moderna with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Forty-five participants in Seattle received the experimental jab in March to test its safety.
There is no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself – rather the goal is to check the vaccines show no negative side effects, setting the stage for larger tests.
Dozens of research groups across the world, including Moderna, have taken a different route to traditional vaccine techniques.
Normally a weaker bug is planted in the body so a patient can adapt to fight off the infection – like the MMR vaccine.
But Moderna’s sees messenger RNA stimulate the immune system to make similar proteins to the killer virus, which it can then combat.