The National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) yesterday said it is working “night and day” to develop a vaccine against the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), but a market-ready solution would likely come too late for use in the current outbreak.
The government-funded agency is researching four types of vaccines, one of which could produce results within two to three months, it said in a statement.
Researchers are aiming to create within two months a vaccine that produces a high level of immunity against 2019-nCoV in rats, before beginning clinical trials within six months, NHRI Chairman Lin Tzou-yien (林奏延) said.
However, Institute of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology director Liao Ching-len (廖經倫) said that as genome sequencing of the virus had only recently been completed, it was too early to discuss how effective a possible vaccine might be.
From the laboratory to the market, the vaccine development process usually takes one to three years, even in the US, so this vaccine would not be used in the current outbreak, he said.
The first of the NHRI’s vaccine types, a peptide vaccine, uses protein components to engineer targeted immune responses and could be developed within a few months, Liao said.
A second type, a recombinant vaccine, takes a virus that is safely and effectively used in other vaccines and modifies it to include gene coding for immunity to other viruses, and would likely take three to five months to develop, he said.
Liao did not provide a time frame for the third and fourth approaches — DNA and subunit vaccines.
Liao said that epidemic prevention measures must consider all possible contingencies, and the institute’s current vaccine development work would have an important role to play if the coronavirus becomes a public health concern in the long term.
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