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The UK’s first vaccine candidate to prevent coronavirus infection will begin clinical trials on human volunteers next week.
Its developers at Oxford University hope to have a dose of 1 million vaccines ready by September to carry out large-scale clinical trials in the fall and, if all goes well, produce 100 million doses by the end of the year.
The team at the Oxford Jenner Institute gave an update on the ambitious project on Friday, including alliances with seven companies in the UK, Europe and Asia to expand manufacturing. The update came before the UK government announced that it is creating a Vaccine Task Force.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientist, will lead the group, with colleagues from government, universities and industry. “The task force will ensure that any potential coronavirus vaccines, when available, can be produced quickly and on a scale to make them available to the public as quickly as possible,” he said.
At least 80 coronavirus vaccine projects are underway worldwide, with two of the most advanced in the UK.
The government has awarded research funds of £ 2.2 million to the Oxford project and another £ 1.8 million to another coronavirus program at Imperial College London, which is slightly behind Oxford in its clinical trial schedule and plans to start conducting tests with human volunteers in June.
“Some of the other vaccine groups have already started human testing before, but since our approach is still relatively new and has never been tested before, we must complete work on animal models to ensure it is safe,” said Robin Shattock, leader of the Imperial vaccine project.
The two UK companies use different technologies. Oxford scientists genetically engineered a harmless chimpanzee virus, called adenovirus, to produce the surface “spike protein” that the coronavirus uses to infect human cells. This prepares the immune system to recognize and attack Covid-19 if the recipient is exposed to the virus after vaccination.
At Imperial, the team developed an RNA vaccine that delivers genetic instructions to human muscle cells to make the same coronavirus spike protein, rather than inject it into a virus.
Sarah Gilbert, head of the Oxford team, said she was “80 percent sure” that her approach would work. Although there is now a crash program to adapt the technology to Covid-19, “chimpanzee adenoviral vectors are a well-studied type of vaccine, which have been used safely in thousands of subjects in vaccines targeting more than 10 types. of diseases, “he said.
The new task force will aim to facilitate regulatory and manufacturing avenues for the Oxford and Imperial teams to conduct clinical trials as quickly as possible, telescopic procedures that would normally take years in a few months. At the same time, it will build production facilities to produce hundreds of millions of doses very quickly, if the trials prove to be successful.
The Oxford team has already aligned seven bioprocessing companies as manufacturing partners, said Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute. Three are in the UK: Pall in Portsmouth, Cobra Biologics in Keele and Oxford BioMedica in Oxford.
Additionally, Oxford is working with Advent, an Italian company, and Halix in the Netherlands, as well as unidentified partners in India and China.
Both universities emphasized that the development of the coronavirus vaccine should not be seen as a race between national groups but as an international effort.
Oxford is also partially funded by the Coalition for Outbreak Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), an international vaccine development body to which the UK government has pledged £ 250 million.
Professor Hill said it would be essential to ensure access to vaccines by people around the world who need them most, “although no one has the solution right now to prioritize supplies.”
