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Elisa Granato was the first volunteer to be injected into a human trial.
A coronavirus vaccine appears to have provided protection against Covid-19 disease in six rhesus macaque monkeys.
It gives early hope for the vaccine, which is now undergoing human clinical trials.
However, there is no guarantee that this result will translate into people.
Animals that received the vaccine, and then were exposed to SARS-CoV-2, had fewer viruses in their lungs and airways.
That compares to the control group of monkeys that did not receive the vaccine.
The trial took place in the USA. USA, with the participation of researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the US government. USA And from Oxford University.
The vaccine appeared to protect animals against the development of pneumonia.
Rhesus macaques have human-like immune systems.
Promisingly, they also did not develop an “immune-enhanced disease,” which Fergus Walsh, a BBC medical correspondent, describes as a “theoretical risk.” That’s when the vaccine triggers a worse response to disease.
How close are we to developing a vaccine?
This response was seen in some of the first trials with animal vaccines against SARS, another coronavirus, and proved to be an obstacle in the development of a vaccine for that disease.
The study has not yet been reviewed by other scientists and officially published, but Professor Stephen Evans of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine described it as “high quality” and “very encouraging”.
Meanwhile, trials are currently underway in the UK with more than 1,000 human volunteers through the University of Oxford.
More than 100 experimental coronavirus vaccines are currently being developed.
Dr. Penny Ward, a visiting professor of pharmaceutical medicine at King’s College London, said it was “helpful” to see that the vaccine did not cause a worse response to disease in these monkeys, and that they did not develop pneumonia after being vaccinated.
The vaccine is based on a small part of the virus’s distinctive “peak”. The idea is that by having the body recognize a single part of the virus, when exposed to everything, it will know how to react and produce the right antibodies to fight it.
This seemed to be happening with vaccinated macaques, which produced antibodies capable of fighting the virus.
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