Currently, there are more than 160 potential vaccines for COVID-19 under development and experts suggest that a viable vaccine could be ready by the end of the year. Some experts ask for caution as this timeline is extremely optimistic, even unrealistic. With only a small number of those vaccine candidates actually being tested on humans and the fact that many of the other vaccine projects won’t survive beyond the laboratory stage, they could be right.
Even so, vaccine funding has been plentiful and a wide range of different approaches are being studied and this had led to collaborations being created between the small firms developing the vaccines and the large pharmaceutical companies who can mass produce them.
With that being said, we are going to take a look at some of the COVID-19 vaccines that are further along in testing than others and that seem much more promising. Let’s get started:
Novavax- developed by the U.S.-based company, Novavax, NVX-CoV2373 uses technology that generates antigens (that stimulate the immune system) derived from the coronavirus spike protein.
Sinopharm- an inactivated vaccine from Sinopharm Wuhan Biological Products Research Institute in China has been tested on 1,120 people ages 18-59 with a response rate of 97.6%.
Clover Biopharmaceuticals- China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals’ protein-based vaccine is designed to resemble the spike protein on the virus. The company aims to conduct a global phase IIb/III study by the end of the year.
Moderna- Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine uses messenger RNA, an approach that does not require a virus to make the vaccine. The company states that the ‘messenger RNA, or mRNA, carries instructions for making the spike protein, a key protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that allows the virus to enter cells when a person gets infected. When the vaccine with this instruction molecule is injected, it goes to the immune cells and instructs them to make copies of the spike protein, acting as if the cells have already been infected with the coronavirus. This allows other immune cells to develop ways to protect you and therefore gives you immunity.’
Inovio- Inovio’s vaccine, INO-4800, uses DNA designed to produce a specific immune response. Once the DNA is inside a cell, it instructs it to make many copies of the artificial DNA. This, in turn, stimulates the body’s natural immune response.
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