The development of a COVID-19 vaccine remains to be a challenge for medical experts and other scientists. While progress is being made, the virus continues to spread across the globe. The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 falls within the same coronavirus category as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS-CoV that also once affected global populations.
According to the latest report on Fox News, there have been more than 151,006 deaths from the 2.2 million infected cases across the world as of Friday, April 17. Meanwhile, almost 34,614 people have succumbed to the deadly virus.
With this in hand, researchers and scientists are conducting experiments in the hope of finding the vaccine needed to stop the coronavirus. According to Fox News, new research has found a vaccine called ChAdOx1 MERS, also known as the Chimp Adenovirus MERS-CoV vaccine, which was used in monkeys.
The research discovered that the chimp vaccine protected the two groups of rhesus macaque monkeys from MERS-CoV. The report clarified that the Chimp Adenovirus MERS-CoV vaccine is still under investigation.
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According to Fox News, the research was conducted by the scientists of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. The team of scientists collaborated with the researchers at the University of Oxford Jenner Institute.
The team of researchers developed the ChAdOx1 vaccine at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The results of the study were then published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
According to the National Institutes of Health, the macaque study was conducted in three groups of animals. The animals in one of the groups were vaccinated 28 days before the infection caused by a coronavirus, while the other group of animals received two sets of vaccinations. The two sets of vaccines is a prime-boost strategy.
The first vaccine was also injected 28 days before infection while the second vaccine was injected 56 days after the first set. Meanwhile, the third group of monkeys served as controls.
The results of the said study showed that none of the animals in the first and second group developed symptoms of the MERS-CoV disease. The animals in the second group (prime-boost group) that received two vaccinations clearly showed less virus infection in their lung tissues, and no evidence of the replicating virus was found.
Meanwhile, the first group, the prime-only group, showed fewer viruses in their lung tissue than the control group. Both of the groups that received the vaccine showed no lung damage and were protected from the MERS-CoV, unlike the control subjects.
The ChAdOx1 MERS-CoV vaccine is still in its Phase 1 human clinical trials in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.
