Time To Look For 2nd Gen Vaccines

Most pharmaceutical companies, across the world, are working at a breakneck speed to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. Some companies are concerned that these vaccines may not be particularly effective in preventing COVID-19 infections in the long-term. This has evoked the need in them to develop improved, next-generation vaccines against the novel coronavirus. BioSpectrum discusses this next phase of vaccine development and if it’s too early to think about the second generation when we don’t even have the first ready yet.

- Ayesha Siddiqui

The first confirmed death from COVID-19 occurred on January 9, 2020 and triggered the race to find a course of treatment that would treat, cure and prevent the ill-effects of this novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Most of the pharmaceutical firms chose to work on developing a vaccine for the new virus.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) various types of vaccines are being researched and tested; some traditional and others experimental. There are about 30 candidate vaccines in clinical evaluation and 139 candidate vaccines in preclinical evaluation as of August 20, 2020.

Although this rapid pace is an impressive example of how science and medicine can be deployed to address public health, there are potential problems that could arise.

Sharing his concerns on the safety issues related to COVID-19 vaccine, Dr Michael S Kinch, Director, Center for Research Innovation in Biotechnology & Drug Discovery, Washington University in St Louis, USA said, “Importantly, I am just as impatient for a vaccine as everyone else and am confident that we will achieve our goal, but we must be aware that certain risks will likely arise if or because we are cutting corners. A vaccine is intended to trigger a long-lived response, ideally conferring lifelong protection. Were a vaccine to trigger an unsafe cross-reaction that causes persistent inflammation or auto-immunity, the outcomes could be tragic. Hopefully, the clinical trials will exclude this but the time in which follow up investigation occurs will be so brief that we might miss some of this.”