In the worldwide race for a vaccine to stop the coronavirus, the laboratory sprinting fastest is at Oxford University.Most other teams have had to start with small clinical trials of a few hundred participants to demonstrate safety. But scientists at the university's Jenner Institute had a head start
In the worldwide race for a vaccine to stop the coronavirus, the laboratory sprinting fastest is at Oxford University.
“The rhesus macaque is pretty much the closest thing we have to humans,” Munster said, noting that scientists were still analyzing the result. He said he expected to share it with other scientists next week and then submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. More than one vaccine would be needed in any case, Emini argued. Some may work more effectively than others in groups like children or older people, or at different costs and dosages. Having more than one variety of vaccine in production will also help avoid bottlenecks in manufacturing, he said.
Paradoxically, the growing success of efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, may present yet another hurdle. The Jenner Institute’s coronavirus efforts grew out of Hill’s so-far unsuccessful pursuit of a vaccine against a different scourge, malaria. The Jenner Institute’s effort against the coronavirus uses a technology that centers on altering the genetic code of a familiar virus. A classic vaccine uses a weakened version of a virus to trigger an immune response. But in the technology that the institute is using, a different virus is modified first to neutralize its effects and then to make it mimic the one scientists seek to stop — in this case, the virus that causes COVID-19.
When she heard in January that Chinese scientists had identified the genetic code of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, she thought she might have a chance to prove the speed and versatility of their approach. “I personally don’t believe that in a time of pandemic there should be exclusive licenses,” Hill said. “So we are asking a lot of them. Nobody is going to make a lot of money off this.”
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