New coronavirus vaccine goes into human trials in Australia

Trial is one of several underway that could yield a promising vaccine within a year

As universities and companies around the world race to develop a coronavirus vaccine, an experimental candidate developed by a US biotechnology firm has been injected into 131 human volunteers in Australia.

It comes as the global death toll from Covid-19 reaches roughly 350,000, with some 5.5m confirmed cases worldwide.

The vaccine, created by Maryland company Novavax, has been formulated using an alternative method from the others being developed around the world. That the several vaccines moving into human trials have been constructed using a number of different technologies is regarded as a positive sign, raising the probability that one of them may succeed.

Most of the vaccines currently at the experimental stage are designed to train the immune system to recognise the “spike” protein that studs the coronavirus’ outer surface, priming the body to react as if it were exposed to the real virus.

This can be done using various methods. Some candidate vaccines are made using just the genetic code for that protein, while others use a harmless virus to deliver the protein-producing information; others are made with dead whole virus, a more old-fashioned method.

But Novavax’s candidate is what’s called a recombinant vaccine, another type altogether. It uses genetic engineering to grow harmless copies of the coronavirus spike protein in giant vats of insect cells. Scientists then extracted the protein, purified it, and packaged it into virus-sized nanoparticles.

It’s the same process that Novavax used to create a nanoparticle flu vaccine that recently passed late-stage testing.

Other vaccine developments and studies are underway in various countries. Among them is a vaccine developed at Oxford University, known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or “Chaddox One”.

Human trials are set to proceed to their second and third phases — but with coronavirus infection rates in the UK falling sharply, Oxford scientist Adrian Hill has warned that there may not be enough people in the UK to catch the virus for a conclusive trial to be conducted.

With Associated Press