Even as scientists across the world are racing to find an effective vaccine against the novel coronavirus, a team of researchers from Seattle, Washington in the United States have begun conducting the first clinical trials of a vaccine on humans.
According to reports, four individuals have received the first injections of the vaccine that is being tested at the Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, which has seen 900 people test positive for coronavirus in city, and 40 deaths. The first person to have received the vaccine is a 43-year-old woman from Washington state.
This is being funded by the National Institutes of Health. Moderna Therapeutics is the biotechnology company which has developed the vaccine.
Vaccines are usually developed using inactive or killed forms of the virus, so as to induce a response in the host’s immune system that would produce antibodies naturally, which would fight off the infection. Thereby, if an individual is exposed to the virus after receiving the vaccine, the immune system’s memory cells are activated and aid in fighting off the invading pathogen.
However, Moderna, which is calling the vaccine mRNA-1273, has not made it from the virus that causes COVID-19. Rather, it has used generic material – messenger RNA – that is copied from the culprit virus and that scientists have made in a laboratory. Ribonucleic Acid or RNA is a crucial biological macromolecule essential to all known forms of life.
The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been working with Moderna and they have used the RNA approach as it can produce vaccines quite quickly, Dr Barney Graham, Deputy Director of the institute’s Vaccine Research Center told New York Times.
Due to the urgency of the situation, some of the checks usually in place for vaccines have been skipped – such as ensuring that the virus triggers a response from the immune system in animals who administered the vaccine. For this vaccine, the animal trials have been skipped.
The trial will have 45 healthy participants from the ages of 18 to 55. All of them will be administered two the vaccine at an interval of 28 days.
Three different doses will be put up for test in 15 people each. Participants will be studied to ascertain if the vaccine is safe and if it is stimulating the immune system to make antibodies to combat the virus, preventing it from replication and causing the disease.
Apart from the four participants who took the vaccine on Monday, four more will reportedly be given the shot on Tuesday. The institute will monitor them for a while before more participants are given the shots.
The participants in the trial will be observed for a year. However, a top Moderna execute said that information on safety will be available within a few weeks of the vaccine being given.
After the first round of testing is deemed safe, the second round will ascertain efficacy to verify safety and have more participants.
It was just last week that the United States government had given authorization to a new coronavirus test that had been recently developed by Roche Holding AG, and was said to be able to give results ten times faster than currently used methods.
There have been over 180,000 confirmed cases and over 7,100 deaths reported around the world due to the coronavirus disease. Researchers across the globe from India, Australia, and more have been searching for answers that will help fight the pandemic.