It is not often that one hears the word “pandemic” and “inspired” in the same sentence. But the director of the US National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, says that despite all the suffering and grief that COVID-19 has caused around the world, he has at least witnessed a unprecedented level of cooperation between private industry and alphabet soup of government agencies urgently seeking a vaccine against the devastating virus.
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“We have never had that before. In this case, I suppose the global pandemic has inspired us to do things that maybe we should have done before, “Collins said. “I hope we don’t let it fall apart when we get past this.”
Collins has had first-hand insight into how this gigantic coalition came together to accelerate what is normally an icy pace in the development of any new treatment. As head of the world’s largest medical research center, he closely monitors the detailed scientific progress of the effort, and as one of the highest-ranking health officials in the country, he frequently communicates with the Trump Administration and Congress. like the federal government. The government tries to eliminate all the usual administrative speed bumps that can delay a vaccine. To put his role in perspective, he is the boss of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In a conversation this week with TIME’s national health correspondent Alice Park (as part of the TIME 100: Finding Hope conversations), Collins said he shares Fauci’s “cautious optimism” that a vaccine could be made available by the end. of year. “The Phase I data … seems really encouraging that these are vaccines that generate strong antibody responses,” he said, referring to the first of what are generally three trials in vaccine development, in which a small number people receive trial treatment.
To make that goal feasible, the NIH convened an unprecedented partnership called Accelerating Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines COVID-19, or ACTIV, bringing together seven government agencies, 20 biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and four leading nonprofits. , much more collective intellectual capacity than has ever been brought together under the same umbrella in similar circumstances. As co-chair of ACTIV, Collins said that by his own estimate, he is working 100 hours a week, a level higher than his normal metabolism of 90, to examine dozens of lines of research and focus government resources in the safest way. . and the most promising efforts.
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When the coalition first met, Collins says: “We made a list of all the ideas that existed. There were over 400 of them. Clinical trials with 400 different compounds are not possible. So you have to decide which ones are more important. “
This included 50 candidate vaccines that had to be scaled back to the most promising efforts that represented the least risk to patients. For example, ACTIV is not considering what are known as “kill the virus” vaccines, which introduce weakened “inactivated” versions of the virus that the body’s immune system can learn to fight, but with a not inconsiderable risk of infecting the patient.
Collins also addressed concerns that the speed of the vaccine production process could compromise the safety of the final product. “The way this is going so fast is not about compromising the rigor of those definitive trials that will tell you whether a vaccine works or not,” he said. “It’s about skipping some of those bureaucratic steps and the long delays” between testing phases.
An imminent question, from a high altitude, is how the US government could have been better prepared to respond quickly to the pandemic and, on the other hand, whether the lessons learned from COVID-19 can be devoted to future crisis crises. Health.
“This comes up every time there is a pandemic … and there is always this feeling when they start to get a little better, ‘OK, this time we are going to maintain our readiness and we are going to be ready for the next one.'”
Which is not to say that NIH and its many allies started from scratch. “Take for example the vaccine that is most advanced at the moment for COVID-19: it was based on the experience of trying to make a similar vaccine for SARS and MERS,” he says, which both fall under the broad definition of a “coronavirus” – hence the common description of COVID-19 as “novel”.
“Now with a different coronavirus, knowing exactly what steps to take is why it started so fast,” said Collins. “But I think it’s also fair to say that we could have been in a better place if we had hoped for a global pandemic this time around.” Maybe we will learn the lessons a little better and avoid complacency again in ’21 and ’22. “
It could be said that Collins is in a unique position to face the inevitable clashes between political leaders and medicine. He has a doctorate in chemistry and a medical doctorate, but he has also served in government for 27 years, most notably before being appointed head of the NIH by President Barack Obama as leader of the Human Genome Project, which “had its own moments of be controversial and controversial, “in his words.
This article is part of # TIME100Talks: Finding Hope, a special series with leaders in different fields who encourage action towards a better world. They want more? Sign up to access more virtual events, including live conversations with influential news creators.
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