Powerful New Technologies Are Speeding the Development of a Coronavirus Vaccine
Dr. Adalja is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. He has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings and the system of care for infectious disease emergencies, and as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program, as well as on a FEMA working group on nuclear disaster recovery. Dr. Adalja is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security. He was a coeditor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine, the Emergency Medicine CorePendium, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, UpToDate's section on biological terrorism, and a NATO volume on bioterrorism. He has also published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and the Annals of Emergency Medicine. He is a board-certified physician in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and critical care medicine. Follow him on Twitter: @AmeshAA
A lab tech handling a sample of the novel coronavirus.
One of the main factors that will influence the ultimate trajectory of the novel coronavirus pandemic will be the availability of a vaccine.
Vaccine development has traditionally been a process measured in years and even decades.
Vaccines are incontrovertibly the best means to control infectious diseases and there are no human vaccines against any of the (now) 7 known human coronaviruses. As soon as the gravity of this outbreak was recognized, several companies, along with governmental and non-governmental partners, have embarked on a rapid development program to develop a vaccine targeted at this virus.
Vaccine development has traditionally been a process measured in years and even decades as scientists tinker with a pathogen trying to weaken or dissemble it to render it capable of creating an effective immune response with acceptable levels of side effects. However, in 2020, powerful new vaccine technologies are available to augment traditional vaccine development and are responsible for the rapid delivery of a vaccine candidate for the start of clinical trials.
Vaccine Platforms: A Game-Changing Technology
The new technologies that are being harnessed are what are known as vaccine platform technologies. Vaccine platforms, as my colleagues and I wrote in a report assessing their promise, offer a means to use the same building blocks to make more than one vaccine. To slightly oversimply, a vaccine platform confers the ability to switch out the pathogen being targeted very rapidly, akin to changing a video game cartridge. Indeed, the recently FDA-licensed Ebola vaccine uses another virus as a platform with the requisite Ebola protein inserted.
Because of this rapid availability to utilize platforms for a variety of different targets, the initial development process can be significantly shortened. This is especially true for vaccines utilizing the genetic material of the target alone. These DNA and RNA vaccines basically can be "printed" once the genetic sequence of the target is known.
An RNA vaccine is the approach being used by the Cambridge-based biotech company Moderna – which took just 42 days to produce an experimental vaccine candidate. Clinical testing is expected to begin next month on 45 healthy volunteers.
Another biotech, the Pennsylvania-based Inovio, is using a DNA approach. In essence, such vaccines involve the genetic material being injected and translated into a viral protein by human cells, which then prompt the immune system to make antibodies.
There are other approaches as well. One company, the Maryland-based Novavax, will use nanoparticles, while another is attempting to adapt an orally administered avian coronavirus vaccine and Johnson & Johnson is using different virus platforms to deliver coronavirus proteins (similar to their experimental Ebola vaccine).
At this stage, it is important for all approaches to be on the table in the hope that at least one makes it through clinical trials. There also may be a need for different types of vaccines for different populations.
Vaccines Will Still Take Time
Despite the quick development time made possible by the use of vaccine platforms, clinical testing for safety, efficacy, and dosing schedules will still take months to complete. After this process, the vaccine will need to be mass produced in large quantities to vaccinate, basically, the world. So, for all intents and purposes, we cannot expect to see an approved vaccine for at least a year or maybe longer if everything does not go perfectly well in clinical trials.
Vaccine platform technologies offer a bright ray of hope in the bleak shadow of the pandemic.
Once a vaccine is available, it will likely appear in batches to be distributed to those at highest risk for severe disease, such as the elderly and those with underlying conditions, as well as healthcare workers, first. At this time, it appears children are less likely to experience severe illness and they may not be the first targets for the vaccine but, if this virus is with us (as is predicted), coronavirus vaccination could become part of routine childhood vaccinations.
Changing Pandemic Trajectory
Vaccination will not come fast enough to impact the initial wave of the novel virus which may continue until summer approaches in temperate climates. However, it will be a crucial tool to blunt the impact of a future appearance in the following respiratory virus season. This reappearance is all but assured as this virus has adeptly established itself in human populations and is behaving like the community-acquired coronavirus that it is.
A Glimmer of Hope
When looking at the trajectory of the virus, it can appear, thus far, that no public health effort has made a substantial impact on the spread of the virus. However, that trajectory will change with the advent of an efficacious vaccine. Such a vaccine, especially if conferring protection against other human coronaviruses, may result in coronaviruses being taken off the table of biological threats altogether in the future.
Vaccine platform technologies offer a bright ray of hope in the bleak shadow of the pandemic and, if successful, will change the way the world approaches future pandemic threats with more rapid deployment of platform-based vaccines.
Dr. Adalja is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. He has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings and the system of care for infectious disease emergencies, and as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program, as well as on a FEMA working group on nuclear disaster recovery. Dr. Adalja is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security. He was a coeditor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine, the Emergency Medicine CorePendium, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, UpToDate's section on biological terrorism, and a NATO volume on bioterrorism. He has also published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and the Annals of Emergency Medicine. He is a board-certified physician in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and critical care medicine. Follow him on Twitter: @AmeshAA
Urinary tract infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year.
Few things are more painful than a urinary tract infection (UTI). Common in men and women, these infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year and can cause an array of uncomfortable symptoms, from a burning feeling during urination to fever, vomiting, and chills. For an unlucky few, UTIs can be chronic—meaning that, despite treatment, they just keep coming back.
But new research, presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris this week, brings some hope to people who suffer from UTIs.
Clinicians from the Royal Berkshire Hospital presented the results of a long-term, nine-year clinical trial where 89 men and women who suffered from recurrent UTIs were given an oral vaccine called MV140, designed to prevent the infections. Every day for three months, the participants were given two sprays of the vaccine (flavored to taste like pineapple) and then followed over the course of nine years. Clinicians analyzed medical records and asked the study participants about symptoms to check whether any experienced UTIs or had any adverse reactions from taking the vaccine.
The results showed that across nine years, 48 of the participants (about 54%) remained completely infection-free. On average, the study participants remained infection free for 54.7 months—four and a half years.
“While we need to be pragmatic, this vaccine is a potential breakthrough in preventing UTIs and could offer a safe and effective alternative to conventional treatments,” said Gernot Bonita, Professor of Urology at the Alta Bro Medical Centre for Urology in Switzerland, who is also the EAU Chairman of Guidelines on Urological Infections.
The news comes as a relief not only for people who suffer chronic UTIs, but also to doctors who have seen an uptick in antibiotic-resistant UTIs in the past several years. Because UTIs usually require antibiotics, patients run the risk of developing a resistance to the antibiotics, making infections more difficult to treat. A preventative vaccine could mean less infections, less antibiotics, and less drug resistance overall.
“Many of our participants told us that having the vaccine restored their quality of life,” said Dr. Bob Yang, Consultant Urologist at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, who helped lead the research. “While we’re yet to look at the effect of this vaccine in different patient groups, this follow-up data suggests it could be a game-changer for UTI prevention if it’s offered widely, reducing the need for antibiotic treatments.”
MILESTONE: Doctors have transplanted a pig organ into a human for the first time in history
A surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital prepares a pig organ for transplant.
Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital made history last week when they successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human patient for the first time ever.
The recipient was a 62-year-old man named Richard Slayman who had been living with end-stage kidney disease caused by diabetes. While Slayman had received a kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor, his diabetes ultimately caused the kidney to fail less than five years after the transplant. Slayman had undergone dialysis ever since—a procedure that uses an artificial kidney to remove waste products from a person’s blood when the kidneys are unable to—but the dialysis frequently caused blood clots and other complications that landed him in the hospital multiple times.
As a last resort, Slayman’s kidney specialist suggested a transplant using a pig kidney provided by eGenesis, a pharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Mass. The highly experimental surgery was made possible with the Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” initiative, which allows patients with life-threatening medical conditions access to experimental treatments.
The new frontier of organ donation
Like Slayman, more than 100,000 people are currently on the national organ transplant waiting list, and roughly 17 people die every day waiting for an available organ. To make up for the shortage of human organs, scientists have been experimenting for the past several decades with using organs from animals such as pigs—a new field of medicine known as xenotransplantation. But putting an animal organ into a human body is much more complicated than it might appear, experts say.
“The human immune system reacts incredibly violently to a pig organ, much more so than a human organ,” said Dr. Joren Madsen, director of the Mass General Transplant Center. Even with immunosuppressant drugs that suppress the body’s ability to reject the transplant organ, Madsen said, a human body would reject an animal organ “within minutes.”
So scientists have had to use gene-editing technology to change the animal organs so that they would work inside a human body. The pig kidney in Slayman’s surgery, for instance, had been genetically altered using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to remove harmful pig genes and add human ones. The kidney was also edited to remove pig viruses that could potentially infect a human after transplant.
With CRISPR technology, scientists have been able to prove that interspecies organ transplants are not only possible, but may be able to successfully work long term, too. In the past several years, scientists were able to transplant a pig kidney into a monkey and have the monkey survive for more than two years. More recently, doctors have transplanted pig hearts into human beings—though each recipient of a pig heart only managed to live a couple of months after the transplant. In one of the patients, researchers noted evidence of a pig virus in the man’s heart that had not been identified before the surgery and could be a possible explanation for his heart failure.
So far, so good
Slayman and his medical team ultimately decided to pursue the surgery—and the risk paid off. When the pig organ started producing urine at the end of the four-hour surgery, the entire operating room erupted in applause.
Slayman is currently receiving an infusion of immunosuppressant drugs to prevent the kidney from being rejected, while his doctors monitor the kidney’s function with frequent ultrasounds. Slayman is reported to be “recovering well” at Massachusetts General Hospital and is expected to be discharged within the next several days.