Please refer below to an update from our healthcare analyst Dr Derek Jellinek on COVID-19 Vaccine Development:

While global containment strategies may slow the spread of Covid-19, all eyes have turned to the prospect of a vaccine, because only a vaccine can prevent people from getting sick.

Thanks in large part to early Chinese efforts to sequence and share the genetic material of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, at least 60 vaccine candidates are in development via companies and academic institutions.

• One of the most promising leads on a vaccine is mRNA-1273, developed by Moderna Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MRNA). Trials are currently underway in Washington State, with the earliest versions of the vaccine made available to at-risk groups such as healthcare workers.
• Australian researchers are fast-tracking large-scale human testing to see if a vaccine used for decades to prevent tuberculosis can protect health workers from Covid-19. The trial of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine will be conducted with 4,000 health workers in hospitals around Australia to determine if it can reduce Covid-19 symptoms. Although originally developed against tuberculosis, and still given to over 130m babies annually for that purpose, BCG also boosts humans' 'frontline' immunity, training it to respond to germs with greater intensity. Similar trials are being conducted in several other countries including the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom
• Further down the pipeline are more than 20 types of subunit vaccines. This method of vaccination uses a fragment of a pathogen, typically a surface protein, to trigger an immune response, teaching the body's immune system how to fight off the disease without actually introducing live pathogens.

While the speed with which vaccine candidates have been produced is unprecedented, any likely stumbles will happen in clinical or human trials. These trials are a required perquisite to regulatory approval and usually take place in 3 phases:

Phase 1 - involving a few dozen healthy volunteers, tests the vaccine for safety, monitoring for adverse effects;

Phase 2 - involving several hundred people, usually in a part of the world affected by the disease, looks at how effective the vaccine is, and

Phase 3 - does the same in as in Phase 2, but in several thousand people.

So why all of this testing? Well, trials essentially screen out the 'duds', those candidates that are either unsafe or ineffective or both, which is why clinical trials can't be skipped or hurried. However, approval can be accelerated, especially if regulatory have approved similar products before. But we note, Sars-CoV-2 is a novel pathogen in humans and many of the technologies being used to build vaccines are relatively untested too. So we wouldn't expect any vaccine to be commercialised inside 12 months.

Beyond approval, other potential issues to think about include production capacity (with many of the organisations in the Covid-19 vaccine race simply not having adequate capacity) and global distribution (essentially, a political game to initiate a global immunisation programme).

As all of this is being debated, the pandemic will probably have peaked and declined before a vaccine is available. Nevertheless, a vaccine could still save many lives, especially if the virus becomes endemic or perennially circulating - like flu - and there are further, possibly seasonal, outbreaks...as we believe.

But until then, our best hope is to contain the disease as far as possible. To repeat the sage advice: wash your hands frequently with soap and water; cover your cough and sneeze; and if unwell, avoid contact with others.

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