Scientists have now claimed that a new coronavirus vaccine that can eliminate and neutralize the virus within two weeks is almost at its human trial stage and will be underway in a couple of months.
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The vaccine will deliver proteins in the body to produce antibodies
A new COVID-19 vaccine that delivers proteins to the body to help fight the virus is on its way to human trials in a few months. This scalable vaccine is the first-ever peer-reviewed antidote against the coronavirus affected many countries around the world.
University of Pittsburgh researchers have said that this new kind of treatment would be administered through a painless jab, similar to annual flu vaccination. The team in the United States have already tested the vaccine on mice to study its effects and have observed that it should be able to kill the deadly virus for at least a year.
It will, however, take at least a year and 18 months before this will be available in the public. But when approved, thousands of doses will be produced each day. This Pittsburg Coronavirus Vaccine or PittCoVacc uses an industrial-style production process which makes it highly scalable.
This is the first and only COVID-19 treatment contender that has been studied and analyzed by independent scientists all over the world. It was already published in The Lancet's EBioMedicine journal.
The team of scientists has also tried to apply for approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to start the first human trials with hopes that they would be allowed to begin performing them in the next couple of months.
Professor Louis Falo, a senior study author from the University of Pittsburgh stated that in order to get to the stage where human trials will be performed, it will require at least a year more. According to Falo, "This particular situation is different from anything we've ever seen, so we don't know how long the clinical development process will take. Recently announced revisions to the normal processes suggest we may be able to advance this faster."
They were able to act on this study fast because they already laid out all the groundwork that was needed to be done when the coronavirus was still at its early stage of the outbreak.
They will be using a microneedle array
Another senior study author, Andrea Gambotto also told Daily Mail that they already knew what exactly what they had to do to help stop the virus. "We had previous experience on SARS-CoV in 2003 and MERS-CoV in 2014," Gambotto said. "These two viruses, which are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, teach us that a particular protein, called a spike protein, is important for inducing immunity against the virus."
The PittCovVacc is more conventional when compared to other experimental mRNA vaccines that have just recently begun clinical trials. The team will be using a unique approach as to how they will deliver the drug. They will be using a microneedle array to increase potency. This is a fingertip-sized patch that has 400 tiny needles that can penetrate the skin. This is also where the immune reaction is the strongest.
Manufacturing the vaccine will not a problem according to the researchers. Once this new type of COVID-19 vaccine is approved by the FDA, they will be ready to mass-produce it.
