Coronavirus: Oxford team leaps ahead in race for virus vaccine

WASHINGTON • In the worldwide race for a vaccine to stop the coronavirus, the laboratory sprinting fastest is at Oxford University.

Most other teams have had to start with small clinical trials of a few hundred participants to demonstrate safety.

But scientists at the British university's Jenner Institute had a head start on a vaccine, having proved in previous trials that similar inoculations - including one last year against an earlier coronavirus - were harmless to humans.

That has enabled them to leap ahead and schedule tests of their virus vaccine involving more than 6,000 people by the end of next month, hoping to show not only that it is safe but also that it works.

The Oxford scientists now say that with an emergency approval from regulators, the first few million doses of their vaccine could be available by September - at least several months ahead of any of the other announced efforts - if it proves to be effective.

Now, they have received promising news suggesting that it might.

Scientists at the US National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana last month inoculated six rhesus macaque monkeys with single doses of the Oxford vaccine. The animals were then exposed to heavy quantities of the virus that is causing the pandemic - exposure that had consistently sickened other monkeys in the lab. But more than 28 days later all six were healthy, said Dr Vincent Munster, the researcher who conducted the test.

"The rhesus macaque is pretty much the closest thing we have to humans," Dr Munster said, noting that scientists were still analysing the result. He said he expected to share it with other scientists next week and then submit it to a peer-reviewed journal.

However, immunity in monkeys is no guarantee that a vaccine will provide the same degree of protection for humans. A Chinese company that recently started a clinical trial with 144 participants, SinoVac, has also said that its vaccine was effective in rhesus macaques. But with dozens of efforts now underway to find a vaccine, the monkey results are the latest indication that Oxford's accelerated venture is emerging as a bellwether.

"It is a very, very fast clinical programme," said Dr Emilio Emini, a director of the vaccine programme at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is providing financial support to many competing efforts.

Which potential vaccine will emerge as the most successful is impossible to know until clinical trial data becomes available.

More than one vaccine would be needed in any case, Dr Emini argued. Some might work more effectively than others in groups like children or older people, or at different costs and dosages. Having more than one variety of vaccine in production will also help avoid bottlenecks in manufacturing, he said.

The Oxford effort against the coronavirus uses a technology that centres on altering the genetic code of a familiar virus. A classic vaccine uses a weakened version of a virus to trigger an immune response.

But in the technology that the institute is using, a different virus is modified first to neutralise its effects and then to make it mimic the one scientists seek to stop - in this case, the virus that causes Covid-19. Injected into the body, the harmless impostor can induce the immune system to fight and kill the targeted virus, providing protection.

Professor Adrian Hill, the Jenner Institute's director, is one of five researchers involved in the effort. He has worked with that technology for decades to try to tweak a respiratory virus found in chimpanzees to elicit a human immune response against malaria and other diseases.

Over the past 20 years, the institute has conducted more than 70 clinical trials of potential vaccines against the parasite that causes malaria. None has yet yielded a successful inoculation.

A long-time colleague, Professor Sarah Gilbert, 58, modified the same chimpanzee virus to make a vaccine against an earlier coronavirus which causes the Middle East respiratory syndrome. After a clinical trial in Britain demonstrated its safety, another test began in December in Saudi Arabia, where outbreaks of the deadly disease are still common.

When she heard in January that Chinese scientists had identified the genetic code of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, she thought she might have a chance to prove the speed and versatility of their approach. "We thought, 'Well, should we have a go?' " she recalled. "It'll be a little lab project, and we'll publish a paper." It did not stay a "little lab project" for long.

Donors are spending tens of millions of dollars to start the manufacturing process at facilities in Britain and the Netherlands, said a doctor overseeing vaccine production.

The institute last week began a Phase I clinical trial involving 1,100 people. Crucially, next month, it will begin a combined Phase II and Phase III trial involving another 5,000 people. Unlike any other vaccine project now underway, that trial is designed to prove effectiveness as well as safety.

NYTIMES