Coronavirus: Vaccine Shipped for Trials, Drug Testing Underway

Coronavirus: Vaccine Shipped for Trials, Drug Testing Underway

The vaccine is expected to be ready for human testing in April.

As companies around the world are racing to develop vaccines for the potentially fatal coronavirus that originated from Wuhan, Moderna Therapeutics, a biotech company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has created its first batch, which has been shipped to US researchers to be available for human testing.

According to an article in TIME, the vaccine was created just 42 days after the genetic sequence of the COVID-19 virus (or the SARS-CoV-2) was released by Chinese researchers in January.

This development will make Moderna the first biopharma to enroll a drug against the coronavirus for a human trial.

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The vaccine is expected to be ready for human testing in April, after the first vials were sent to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD.

But NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, in conversation with The Wall Street Journal, estimated that the trial would enroll 25 participants and start in April. The first results could be expected in July or August.

Researchers, led by a team at the University of Nebraska, are also testing the antiviral drug ‘remdesivir’ on a patient infected with the novel coronavirus at NIH. The first volunteer patient is a passenger who tested positive on the ship Diamond Princess and was brought back to the US. Others diagnosed with the infection and consequently hospitalised, will also be part of the study.

The Moderna vaccine is based on a new genetic method that does not require huge amounts of virus. The vaccine is packed with mRNA, a genetic material that comes from DNA and makes protein. The TIME article says, “Moderna loads its vaccine with mRNA that codes for the right coronavirus proteins which then get injected into the body. Immune cells in the lymph nodes can process that mRNA and start making the protein in just the right way for other immune cells to recognize and mark them for destruction.”

President of Moderna, Dr Stephen Hoge, was quoted as saying,

“mRNA is really like a software molecule in biology. So our vaccine is like the software program to the body, which then goes and makes the [viral] proteins that can generate an immune response.”

In another article in MedCity News, Juan Andres, Moderna’s chief technical operations and quality officer said, in a statement, “I want to thank the entire Moderna team for their extraordinary effort in responding to this global health emergency with record speed. This would not have been possible without our Norwood manufacturing site, which uses leading-edge technology to enable flexible operations and ensure high-quality standards are met for clinical-grade material.”

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