WHO: At Least 70 Candidate Vaccines Against Coronavirus, Under Development

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that there are already 70 coronavirus vaccines being developed around the world. Various biotech companies are already developing vaccines with at least three companies or candidate vaccines undergoing clinical evaluation, and 67 candidate vaccines in preclinical evaluation.

Big and small pharmaceuticals have taken part to try and develop a vaccine, and this is crucial to contain the virus. Progress in developing vaccines is happening at unprecedented speeds, as the infectious pathogen seems to be difficult to eradicate through simple measures alone. The drug industry is hoping to compress the time needed to develop a vaccine to market which usually takes 10 to 15 years, into just a year as a response to the gravity of the current situation.

WHO published its updated list of COVID-10 candidate vaccines on April 11, 2020. Of the three companies already in clinical trials, Chinese biotech company CanSino Biological Inc. in partnership with the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology is already in Phase 2 of human trials, while American biotech startups Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna are both in Phase 1, and have begun human testing.

CanSino Biological is known for its help in producing Ad5-EBOV, an Ebola Virus vaccine in 2017. Its research with Beijing Institute of Biotechnology is funded by China's Ministry of Science and Technology.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a small biotech company in Pennsylvania, said on April 6 that it has started a trial for 40 healthy volunteers in Philadelphia and Kansas City, Missouri. Inovio's vaccine project has been supported by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other nonprofits. The biotech hopes to have early safety results by late summer and it targets production of 1 million doses by the end of this year.

The small biotech company Moderna, has enrolled healthy volunteers in Washington and Georgia to test a potential coronavirus vaccine. The biotech has sequenced the virus and studied patient dosages in two months, and it hopes to have a coronavirus vaccine ready by this fall.

Some of the biotech and pharmaceutical companies developing their vaccines according to reports from Bloomberg and Business Insider are pharma giants Sanofi, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and GlaxoSmithKline.

According to a report from Science Alert, Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said, that it might take at least a year or a year and a half for the United States to see a coronavirus vaccine. This estimate is an optimistic projection according to Paul Offit, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine in the late 90s.

A 12-18 month-target is a blink, according to vaccine experts, because new vaccines are required to be tested first in a laboratory, followed by animal testing, then in a small group of people for safety. However, due to the urgency, several steps are being bypassed to get a vaccine approved. Experts are concerned that this urgency may lead to a vaccine that weakens a person's reaction to the virus.

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine said that conducting animal testing reduces the risk when it does not occur in laboratory animals.