Researchers ramp up efforts to develop coronavirus vaccine

Pharmaceutical firms and research groups in China, US and other countries are racing to find a vaccine for new virus.

In medical research labs around the world, scientists are racing to develop a vaccine for a new type of coronavirus that has infected more than 28,000 people and killed over 560 others.

NEWS /ASIA PACIFIC
Researchers ramp up efforts to develop coronavirus vaccine
Pharmaceutical firms and research groups in China, US and other countries are racing to find a vaccine for new virus.

by Ruairi Casey
06 Feb 2020 GMT+3
In medical research labs around the world, scientists are racing to develop a vaccine for a new type of coronavirus that has infected more than 28,000 people and killed over 560 others.

Weeks after the virus was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, at least a dozen biopharmaceutical firms and academic research facilities in China, the United States and others have launched programmes to find an effective vaccine.

One scientist at the Imperial College in London, UK, announced on Wednesday that his team could move towards trials on animals as early as next week and then onto humans within a matter of months. Meanwhile, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a global partnership launched in 2017 to fight new infectious diseases, said it had launched three programmes to develop vaccines and hoped to have a potential vaccine for clinal testing within 16 weeks.

Experts say the effort to combat the coronavirus is among one of the quickest responses in recent history. It took researchers more than 20 months to come up with an experimental vaccine for the virus that caused the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), a deadly outbreak that also originated in China and infected more than 8,000 people between 2002 and 2003.

The new virus, officially named as 2019-nCov, belongs to the same family as SARS and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which has killed more than 850 people since it was first detected in 2012.

The vaccine for MERS is still under development.

The apparent rapid progress in the search for a vaccine to fight the coronavirus, according to analysts, is due to a decision by Chinese authorities to share information about the virus with the public. Advancements in new technology and better collaboration between researchers has also aided the process.