Coronavirus vaccine needed, but safety key, researcher says

Peter Friedmann

Dr. Peter D. Friedmann, Baystate Health’s chief research officer and associate dean for research for the University of Massachusetts Medical School-Baystate.

Coronavirus has caused a pandemic infecting more than 409,000 people worldwide and claiming more than 18,000 lives.

A big key for the hope to return to a normal life is a vaccine to help the body’s immune system fight off infection, thus stopping replication and spread of the RNA virus that is a spillover into humans from an animal host.

A Phase 1, six-week clinical trial of a vaccine called mRNA-1273, which was developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and their collaborators at Moderna, Inc., a Cambridge-based biotenchology company, has just begun at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle.

Dr. Peter D. Friedmann, Baystate Health’s chief research officer and associate dean for research for the University of Massachusetts Medical School-Baystate, was asked about the trial and the challenges of developing a vaccine for coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2

What makes developing a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 so challenging?

Vaccine development is very challenging and time consuming. A vaccine is designed to make the immune system generate antibodies against particular proteins in a pathogen like a virus.

Picking the right protein or proteins is a challenge because you don’t want proteins closely related to one in human cells. This could trigger autoimmune problems.

Then you have to do animal studies and Phase 1 human studies to determine safety and immune response.

Safety is a big deal because you will be giving it to hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people, so adverse effects in even less than 1% of people will harm tens of thousands. Then you have to do larger scale Phase 2 trials to determine efficacy.

Even if safe and effective, there are issues of producing it at large scale with quality controls, and the issue of the virus mutating such that the vaccine becomes ineffective. That’s what happens with influenza - each year a new vaccine must be developed because the virus changes.

What did researchers learn from studying the virus that caused the Severe Acute Respiratory, SARS, epidemic in 2003?

The SARS virus is a cousin to SARS-CoV-2. Researchers learned that the spike proteins - the “crowns” on the coronovirus - that bind the virus to human cells make a good target for the vaccine. However, interest in completing human testing of the SARS vaccine waned once that crisis passed. So another lesson is that it is important to complete that work even after the immediate crisis abates because it will help with the inevitable future outbreaks of similar pathogens.

How has what they learned helped in the development of the vaccine under trial currently by the NIH and what are the risks behind such a trial?

My understanding is that the vaccine developed by Moderna with NIH targets the spike proteins.

Beyond the vaccine producing intolerable adverse effects, the risk is that the vaccine will not prove effective, or will be effective against the current presented proteins, but the virus mutates rendering it ineffective.

Does the efficiency of the human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 surprise you?

I am not a virologist, but given the relatively long period of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic shedding, SARS-CoV-2 seems perfectly designed for human-to-human transmission.

That is unlike viruses like Ebola, which make people very sick and kill quickly, limiting its ability to spread.

If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.