COVID-19 vaccine: What are the latest updates?
With a sporadic increase in the number of cases and deaths, COVID-19 is growing beyond control in India. The situation is so grim that people are not even getting hospital beds in the nation's capital. Now, at a time like this, the only way to exit this pandemic is to create and distribute a vaccine. Here are all the developments related to vaccine development.
AZD1222, the COVID-19 vaccine jointly developed by British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and Oxford University has gone into production in partnership with the Serum Institute of India and two Bill Gates-backed global health organizations. The company hopes to have 2 billion doses of the vaccine ready by September so that once clinical trial results are out (expected by August), they could begin distribution immediately.
American companies are also moving forward with vaccine development. President Donald Trump recently said the country has 2 million doses (possibly the one by Moderna, which is in Phase-2 of clinical trials) ready to go if it checks out for safety. Meanwhile, Director of US's NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, also gave an optimistic timeline, saying they expect to have 200 million doses by 2021.
Along with Britain and America, Australia's University of Queensland and biotech company CSL are working to produce 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine that uses an innovative "molecular clamp technology" by the end of next year. Their formula has shown positive results in lab trials and will be tested on some 120 individuals next month before expanding to more people later this year.
Japan and Singapore have also joined the COVID-19 vaccine race, with the former hoping to have a vaccine developed, mass-produced, and distributed in the first half of 2021. Meanwhile, Singapore claims to be carrying out trials of a vaccine and is moving to ramp up manufacturing for its own mass-production as well as to offer contract-manufacturing services to other vaccine developers.
Overall, 133 COVID-19 vaccines have been developed so far. Out of these, 123 are in the pre-clinical trial phase while the remaining 10 are moving through human trials and simultaneous manufacturing (in some cases). The 10 promising candidates come from Moderna, AstraZeneca, CanSino Biological, Novavax, BioNTech, Sinovac, Inovio Pharma, Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, Beijing Institute of Biological Products, and Institute of Medical Biology.
