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Work on the COVID-19 vaccine is ongoing. They are run by several independent centers. Accurate data show that there may be more than 90 such preparations in the future.
Several dozen companies from around the world are working on the vaccine - over 30 from the USA, several from China, Europe, Australia and Asian countries. According to Nature, which summarized the work, there are over 90 such projects in total.
The task of the vaccine is "simple" - it is to provide the body with an antigen that will not cause disease, but will trigger an immune response, and in effect will make the body fight the virus if it comes into contact with it.
Clinical safety trials in humans have already started on at least six vaccine projects. These are to determine if the vaccine is harming, but the real challenge will be to find out if it works at all. Under normal circumstances, this involves giving thousands or tens of thousands of people a vaccine - or a placebo - and watching them for months, if not years. If the vaccine works, there will be a noticeable difference in the number of people infected over time in a normal life. Long-term observation of a large number of people also allows you to detect possible problems related to security.
But in a pandemic, with thousands more deaths each day and billions of people still uninfected, it is imperative to speed up and streamline the work. This month, the World He alth Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, outlined plans for a clinical trial that will allow multiple vaccines to be tested in one study.
The WHO's Solidarity Vaccine Trial program aims to accelerate vaccine development through an adaptive design that allows the continuous addition of vaccines to the study. Participants will be enrolled continuously and vaccines that do not appear to work may be removed from the tests.
As Katherine O'Brien, who heads the WHO's Immunization, Vaccine and Biological Research Division, pointed out, no vaccine has ever been implemented under the rescue legislation. If coronavirus vaccines follow this path, regulators will seek additional assurance that the vaccine is safe.
Some researcherssuggest even faster and more radical methods: instead of waiting for natural infections, study participants could intentionally infect young, he althy volunteers. This has already happened in the studies of malaria and dengue fever. Berkley says the challenge trials could be used to quickly determine which vaccines will go into large-scale trials. However, without an effective drug or genetic test to identify the few young people who may develop severe disease, it would be too risky.
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