Vaccine Race— The Candidates

The starting gun was sounded as far back as the weekend of January 11-12, when Chinese authorities released the full sequence of the COVID-19 genome.

- Siddharth Premkumar

The ‘vaccine race’ has now grown to field some 118 potential candidates and seen unprecedentedly short projected completion windows—most experts endorse a 12-18 month ‘best-case scenario’. Traditionally, a vaccine’s clinic-to-market cycle can take upwards of a decade. Though the global health emergency brought on by COVID-19 has looked like catalysing that marathon into a sprint, the race has regulatory, scientific and market hurdles to overcome: the transition from proof-of-principle to commercial development will be plagued by bottlenecks. And attrition too will play its part: industry benchmarks peg the failure rate at greater than 90 per cent. No wonder the European Medicines Agency dismisses claims of a ‘cure by Christmas’.

All this unfolds against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions and ‘vaccine nationalism’— faultlines that grew wider still at the WHO’s 73rd (but first ‘virtual’) World Health Assembly on May 18-19. Just days later, Donald Trump was to announce that America would be “terminating its relationship” with WHO. But at the Assembly, USbased biotech firm Moderna was making a pitch for Olympic gold. One of around eight candidates in clinical trials, Moderna cited early, non-peer reviewed data from Phase I human trials that began in March to announce that its mRNA-1273 vaccine had