Here are some key points from an interesting opinion piece published in the New York Times.
Assuming we already know Corona virus, vaccine is expected to be ready by May 2036 if no strategies for shortening the time-line is taken:
If we don’t wait for academic research, vaccine can be made available by August 2034:
If we rely on work from studying SARS and MERS to shorten preparations before clinical trials and start trials early, vaccine can be made available by January 2034:
If we don’t wait for academic research and start trials early, vaccine can be made available by April 2032:
Neither of these scenarios seem to help the prevailing situation. Hence, there is a need to move at “pandemic-speed” and put all the existing drug discovery work that is underway that relate to Covid-19. There are at least 254 therapies and 95 vaccines related to Covid-19 being explored.
It is important to recognize that less than 10 percent of drugs that enter clinical trials are ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The rest are either not effective, don’t perform better than existing drugs or have too many side effects.
Typically, vaccine development process takes a decade or longer.
Since the virus that causes Covid-19, are roughly 80 percent identical to the ones causing SARS, and given that both use so-called spike proteins to grab onto a specific receptor found on cells in human lungs, there has been some head start with regards to research.
Here are some additional options to shorten the timeline (even earlier than April 2032):
By going with ‘pandemic speed’ time-line and starting subsequent steps before previous phases are completed, vaccine can be made available by July 2030:
By moving more swiftly to Phase 3 trials by combining phases, vaccine can be made available by January 2030:
If the decision is made to go with emergency provisioning, i.e. vaccinating front-line and essential workers early, vaccine can be made available by December 2030:
If the three above-mentioned strategies are adopted (i.e. moving at 'pandemic-speed’ timeline, pushing to large-scale testing sooner, and using emergency provisions), vaccine can be made available to front-line and essential workers by February 2028 and to everyone else by June 2029.
Unfortunately, none of these scenarios can make the vaccine available in 12 to 18 months time horizon.
The risks and difficulties of fast-tracking vaccine research are huge ranging from the fact that poorly researched vaccines can actually makes it easier to catch the virus, or makes the disease worse after someone’s infected. Researchers also can’t easily infect vaccinated participants with the coronavirus to see how the body behaves. They normally wait until some volunteers contract the virus naturally. That means dosing people in regions hit hardest by the virus, like New York, or vaccinating family members of an infected person to see if they get the virus next. If the pandemic subsides, this step could be slowed.
As can be seen the longest time in the fastest scenario illustrated above is taken by supply chain activities such as building factories and manufacturing. If factories can be built now and manufacture can begin early, anticipating that factories will be useful for a future vaccine and that the product will clear regulatory hurdles, the timeline can be brought down from June 2029 (without taking a bet on the mRNA vaccine) to October 2023:
Finally if we can start building factories now and can bet on mRNA vaccine, vaccine can be made available by June 2022:
Finally fast tracking federal approval from one year to six months can further bring down the time and make the vaccine available by December 2021:
Source: Thompson, S.A. 2020. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? New York Times, April 30, 2020