Coronavirus vaccines

Abstract

It is hard to predict when vaccines against infection by SARSCoV-2 coronavirus may become available. The emergence of COVID-19 has led people to think that the best way of preventing it will be by using vaccines, as normally occurs when a new infectious disease appears. News items are published continuously in the general media which state that vaccines will arrive in a few months; however, there are relatively few papers in the scientific press about this subject. There is clearly greatinterestin producing vaccines against this disease, and many companies and academic institutions around the world are working to achieve this. The informative draft supplied by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and updated on 11 April lists 70 candidate products for vaccines that are under evaluation: 3 vaccines that are being clinically evaluated, and 67 which are in preclinical evaluation. The majority of these products are under development in basic research laboratories; if they pass the first phases, they will have to be transferred to pharmaceutical industries which have the capacity to perform the clinical trials that are necessary to guarantee their efficacy and safety, with the necessary scale of manufacturing capacity to supply the vaccines to the populations that need them. Rather than months, the timescale involved in achieving this is normally counted in years. Nevertheless, the enormous humanitarian and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is driving the evaluation of next generation vaccine technology platforms, using new paradigms to accelerate development. In fact, clinical evaluation of the first candidate vaccines commenced with unprecedented swiftness on 16 March 2020, taking into account the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence was published on 11 January 2020. This is why different international medical bodies estimate that 12-18 months will be required before a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is available.