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yesORIENTAL DE Y OXFORD Ring road, some distance from the famous spiers, is a collection of glass office buildings that includes the Jenner Institute. Described by an industry watcher as a “slightly dusty corner” of the university, until six months ago he was primarily engaged in useful but poorly funded research on diseases suffered by people in poor countries. Now he has become the most likely candidate to produce the world’s first covid-19 vaccine.
With governments around the world pouring money, the effort to get a vaccine resembles a more urgent version of the space race. According to a count maintained by the Milken Institute, a group of American experts, 180 vaccines are being developed. In late June, China approved an emergency authorization to allow its military to use a vaccine that has not yet been tested. Several American vaccines are working well, but have not yet progressed to late-stage testing. Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the World Health Organization, says the Oxford vaccine is the top candidate.
The Oxford vaccine is already in three late-stage trials. Only one other vaccine, developed by Sinopharm, a Chinese firm, has started a late-stage trial, and it doesn’t have the support and global finances that Oxford has. AstraZeneca, a British pharmaceutical company, is building an international supply chain to ensure that the vaccine is available “widely and quickly”.
In late August it could be clear whether the vaccine is effective or not. A single successful trial showing efficacy would allow a regulator to approve the vaccine for emergency use, something that would likely pave the way for use in high-risk groups. That could happen in October. The firm believes that full approval, which would require results from multiple trials, could go as early as 2021. Vaccine development typically takes 10 to 15 years, so this would be a remarkable result.
Oxford, which rivals Cambridge as Britain’s best university for life sciences, is rich not only in talent but also in research money. None of the roughly 60 university groups working on the disease expected government funding. “I think that is one of the reasons Oxford has done so well in this,” says one source. “We just went up and we did it.” Since then, other Oxford researchers have identified the first drug tested to reduce covid-19 mortality. But it may turn out that the Jenner Institute has made the greatest progress of all.
The institute began operating on January 11, the day after covid-19’s genetic material was sequenced. He had previously developed a vaccine against a closely related virus that causes MERS, another coronavirus disease. Sarah Gilbert, the head of the laboratory at the institute that had done the work, and her team have now designed a chimpanzee virus to deliver a portion of the covid-19 genetic material to the body, thereby generating an immune response.
Once the vaccine was made, the drug regulator, the MHRA, rushed through clinical trial approval. In normal times you have 60 days to respond to a request; In this case, he gave his approval in a week. Later stage trials were accelerated by using provisional data from earlier trials, rather than waiting for final data.
At the same time, factories had to be found to produce the vaccine. In March the UK The Bioindustry Association conducted a survey, which found that “there was limited ability to scale to significant volumes,” says Steve Bates, the association’s executive director. That quickly changed when Oxford worked with domestic manufacturers. In April, he signed an agreement with AstraZeneca that soon had hundreds of employees working to expand the vaccine.
The vaccine is grown within cells that are grown in tanks called bioreactors. Production starts small, at 200 liters. When AstraZeneca is happy with what it produces in the smallest bioreactor, production will increase. Four 2,000-liter bioreactors can produce a billion doses in two months. Although AstraZeneca is not a vaccine company, the processes to produce a vaccine are similar to those used for its biotech products.
According to AstraZeneca, making each dose of the vaccine costs almost as much as a cup of coffee. Two billion doses have already been ordered. The company agreed to supply more than a billion doses to Europe, Great Britain, America and GAVI, a vaccine financing group. The Indian Whey Institute is also producing an additional 1 billion doses of the Oxford vaccine, primarily for low- and middle-income countries, of which 400 million will be manufactured before the end of 2020. In Britain, doses of 30 millions will be available by September.
But the big question, whether the immune response generated by the vaccine is enough to protect against disease, has yet to be answered. In an ongoing British trial designed to discover this, 7,000 patients were injected; New trials have just started in Brazil and South Africa. They should also determine whether the vaccine is safe, whether it produces a rare reaction in which it exacerbates rather than improves the disease, and whether one or two doses are required to provide protection.
If the vaccine works, governments will have to decide who should receive it first. In Britain, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, which advises the government, recommended that front-line health and social workers, then the most vulnerable, be first in line. But she cautioned that her advice may change if more data is obtained on the dynamics of disease transmission or the effects of a vaccine.
Boris Johnson has called the race for the vaccine “the most urgent shared effort of our lives.” It is not, he insists, “a competition between countries.” But he would certainly be delighted if the world’s first shot came from Oxford. In addition to pulling the world out of crisis, such a triumph could mitigate the blow to Britain’s international reputation for government mismanagement of the epidemic.■
Editor’s Note: Part of our Covid-19 coverage is free to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub
This article appeared in the Great Britain section of the print edition under the title “Moonshot”
