As race to develop the coronavirus vaccine finds pace, a?US biotechnology company announced on Tuesday the start of human trials in Australia of a vaccine for the?covid?with hopes of releasing a proven vaccine this year.
Novavax, one of the companies in the mix to develop a covid vaccine,?has begun the first phase of the trial in which 131 volunteers in the cities of Melbourne and Brisbane will test the safety of the vaccine and look for early signs of the vaccine¡¯s effectiveness.
It comes after Oxford University's vaccine moved into second phase of trials after some early encouraging?signs. In addition to that, China, the country where the virus originated also saw first vaccine candidate finish its phase one trial on humans, and the results have been promising.?The vaccine appears to be safe and may protect people from the deadly coronavirus.
Now, Novavax is beginning?to take?baby?steps in the race to develop a vaccine that can finally put an end to a virus that has left over 350,000 dead worldwide.?
We are in parallel making doses, making vaccine in anticipation that we¡¯ll be able to show it¡¯s working and be able to start deploying it by the end of this year, company¡¯s research chief Dr. Gregory Glen told a virtual press conference in Melbourne from Novavax¡¯ headquarters in Maryland.
About a dozen experimental vaccines are in early stages of testing or poised to start, mostly in China, the U.S. and Europe. It¡¯s not clear that any of the candidates ultimately will prove safe and effective. But many work in different ways, and are made with different technologies, increasing the odds that at least one approach might succeed.
Most of the shots in the pipeline aim to train the immune system to recognize the spike protein that studs the coronavirus¡¯ outer surface, priming the body to react if it ever encountered the real infection.?
Some candidates are made using just the genetic code for that protein, and others use a harmless virus to deliver the protein-producing information. Still other vaccine candidates are more old-fashioned, made with the killed whole virus.
Novavax adds another new kind to that list, what¡¯s called a recombinant vaccine. Novavax used genetic engineering to grow harmless copies of the coronavirus spike protein in giant vats of insect cells in a laboratory. Scientists extracted and purified the protein, and packaged it into virus-sized nanoparticles.
The way we make a vaccine is we never touch the virus, Novavax told The Associated Press last month. But ultimately, it looks just like a virus to the immune system. It¡¯s the same process that Novavax used to create a nanoparticle flu vaccine that recently passed late-stage testing.