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In a historic campaign to vaccinate the world against Covid-19, Corbevax was far from the first vaccine to hit the market. Although the first mRNA shots became available 326 days after his SARS-CoV-2 virus was sequenced, it has so far entered the arms of his 75 million children in India, and recently adults. His Corbevax journey, with the approval of the .
But one of its co-inventors, Peter Hotez, thinks it might have played out differently had his team received more funding and a smoother regulatory path.
Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said:
There were good reasons to run fast. The frenzy over life-saving shots has exposed a widening divide between the vaccine haves and the have-nots. A patent-free vaccine based on an old but proven technology, Corbevax can be made affordable and distributed to low-income countries.
Corbevax’s story is relevant to bigger issues as the world seeks to strengthen its vaccine R&D infrastructure to distribute vaccines faster and more equitably. Tricky scientific, regulatory and manufacturing challenges must be resolved ahead of the next pandemic, public health experts and advocacy group representatives said in interviews.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), launched in 2017 following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, proposed a moonshot goal of developing a vaccine against a new pandemic-causing pathogen within 100 days. This initiative is known as the 100 Days Mission.
Melanie Saville, CEPI’s executive director of vaccine research and development, believes the group would have been “laughed out of the room” if people had been told a vaccine would arrive in 326 days before the Covid-19 pandemic. increase. get faster.
“If we really put everyone’s innovation together from Covid-19, we could probably shave two months off by scrutinizing every step of the process,” she said, adding that we could offer companies, international organizations and regulators Cited CEPI’s analysis based on interviews, academia, media.
However, we need to do a lot more to reach 100 days. The key, she added, is to do as much as possible in so-called peacetime, like the decades of RNA research that ushered in the first Covid-19 vaccine.
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