The coronavirus vaccine is successfully tested in monkeys, says laboratory; result still needs to be validated | Coronavirus

The results have yet to be validated by the scientific community.

To arrive at an effective vaccine, researchers must go through several stages, going through preclinical tests, which can be in vitro or in animals; and then for clinical trials. It is estimated that an effective vaccine will take 12-18 months to produce.

A balance from the World Health Organization (WHO), with data up to April 20, indicates that so far at least 76 vaccine trials are being carried out worldwide: 71 in the preclinical phase and 5 in the clinical phase.

This Friday, the WHO announced the launch of a collaborative initiative for drugs, tests and vaccines against Covid-19. According to the WHO, the initiative, called Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator, or ACT Accelerator, will make technologies against the disease “accessible to all who need it, worldwide.”

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Monkey Covid-19 vaccine test

Using inert pathogens from the virus that causes Covid-19, the vaccine was administered to eight Rhesus monkeys, which were then artificially contaminated, according to the results of the study, published by the pharmaceutical giant Sinovac Biotech.

“The four monkeys that received the high-dose vaccine had no trace of the virus in their lungs seven days after the contamination,” the laboratory said.

Four other monkeys, who received the same vaccine, but in lower doses, had a higher viral load in the body. This group also managed to resist the disease.

“These are the first serious data I see about an experimental vaccine,” Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York, said on Twitter.

“The question is whether this protection lasts for a long time,” asked immunologist Lucy Walker of University College London.

In addition to the Sinovac experiment, Beijing approved two other vaccine tests: one, in Hong Kong; and another, in Wuhan, where the pathogen emerged late last year.

Covid-19 vaccine testing in humans

Pharmaceutical groups and laboratories around the world are racing against time to develop an effective treatment and vaccine for Covid-19, which has killed more than 190,000 people worldwide.

Sinovac began clinical trials of this same vaccine in humans on April 16. Consulted by AFP, the laboratory declined to comment.

The US modern laboratory also announced that it is conducting tests.

This week, the German government approved the first clinical trials of a vaccine against the new coronavirus. Two hundred healthy people will participate in the first phase.

In the UK, researchers are already testing another vaccine. One of the scientists at Oxford University said that if all went well, the doses would be available to the public in the fall, spring in the southern hemisphere. The lab is already producing the vaccine on a large scale during testing, and has risked throwing it all away if the product fails.

To arrive at an effective vaccine, researchers must go through several stages. Among them is basic research, which is the survey on the type of vaccine that can be done. Then they go through preclinical tests, which can be in vitro or in animals, to demonstrate the safety of the product; and then for clinical trials, which can be carried out in four other phases:

• Phase 1: carried out in humans, to verify the safety of the vaccine in these organisms
• Phase 2: where the body’s immune response is established (immunogenicity)
• Phase 3: last phase of the study, to obtain the medical history.
• Phase 4: distribution to the population.