Lin Yan | Writing
We seem to be out of a three-year pandemic, but the process has been difficult, tortuous and costly. In fact, the new coronavirus is still widely circulating among people. Although the new crown vaccine is widely vaccinated in the population, it still has not stopped the rapid spread of the virus?
The answer is realistic: the effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccine currently in use is still inadequate. These vaccines were urgently developed at the height of the epidemic and could not completely protect us from the invasion of the virus.
On April 10, the Biden administration in the United States announced that it was launching a big project: the NextGen project. The project will cost $5 billion to accelerate the development of the next generation of coronavirus vaccines and treatments. The NextGen project aims to develop a longer-lasting coronavirus vaccine against all coronavirus variants and possible future coronaviruses.
Mayo Clinic Dr. Gregory Poland
Dr. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic Vaccine Research Group, who was involved in the early design of the project, said, "We have been advising the White House to launch this program since last summer. ”
This huge amount of money is only an initial investment, and "more money is needed to achieve the goal".
John M. Smith, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Moore said that "this goal will be more difficult to achieve than expected."
There is already a new crown vaccine, why continue to spend huge money on research and development?
At present, there are many new crown vaccines that have been approved for marketing, why invest huge amounts of money to continue to develop vaccines?
First, improve the current shortcomings of the new crown vaccine.
At present, regardless of the new crown vaccines used in China and abroad, they are all developed under very urgent and urgent circumstances. When first applied in late 2020, the vaccine was 95% effective, but effectiveness began to wane within a few months.
Due to the extremely rapid mutation of the new crown virus, the protective effect of the vaccine on the human body is not as fast as the virus evolution, and the booster shot is aimed at the original virus and the BA.5 variant, which cannot effectively deal with the diversity of rapid variants of the new crown virus.
NextGen project participant epidemiologist Michael Osterholm noted that "the vaccines currently being developed rapidly in emergency situations are 'really good, but not good enough,' and there is still a lot of work to be done to get better vaccines."
Second, the number of coronaviruses is huge, and new vaccines need to be developed to deal with possible future pandemics.
Currently, there are at least 500 coronaviruses in the world, and the next generation of vaccines is urgently needed.
The contagiousness of the new coronavirus is unparalleled in the coronavirus family, but the coronavirus family is huge, there are at least 500 coronaviruses that we need to deal with, and any one virus mutates and expands its infectivity, which can cause a second terrible pandemic.
Three years into the pandemic, the new crown has claimed many lives, and now we need to prevent the pandemic and kill it in the cradle.
The coronavirus is the third novel coronavirus to emerge in the past 20 years after Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said, "It would be great if there was already a preventable vaccine before the emergence of the fourth coronavirus, which would be a good way to avoid future pandemics."
The three main goals of the NextGen project
This time, the Biden administration's $5 billion NextGen project has three main goals:
1. Development of nasal vaccines to prevent infection and severe disease;
By delivering the vaccine directly to the nasal cavity where the virus enters the body, a protective barrier can be created that can effectively prevent transmission even in mild cases.
2. Develop longer-lasting vaccines;
The data shows that the effectiveness of the current new crown vaccine will weaken after a few months, and the protection period is between six months and one year, and the plan this time is to develop a longer and longer-lasting vaccine.
3. Design broad-spectrum vaccines to protect against all variants and other coronaviruses;
As mentioned earlier, the family of coronavirus vaccines is large and can cause new pandemics at any time, and the new coronavirus is highly variable and will also produce new variants, and in order to cope with these problems, it is necessary to create a "more wider" vaccine.
The Biden administration also said the program would also fund the development of monoclonal antibodies that are more resistant to the new variant.
Antibodies were very effective treatments in the early stages of the epidemic, but as the virus evolved, antibodies could no longer adapt to the rate at which the virus mutated, and current antibodies no longer worked.
The NextGen project is difficult to develop, but it has broad prospects
Despite the ambitious goals of the NextGen project, achieving them can be more difficult than imagined.
Experts say anyone familiar with vaccine development knows that conversion is a more difficult and expensive process than simply producing vaccines, and many research and development projects that seemed good early fail because they can't meet the conditions required for human testing at the manufacturing stage.
Paul Offit, director of the Center for Vaccine Education at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is also not optimistic.
He believes that researchers have been working to develop vaccines against multiple flu strains and HIV for more than 40 years. Both viruses proved elusive because of their rapid mutation.
Meanwhile, nasal vaccines are still undergoing clinical trials, so it's unclear how effective they are against coronavirus.
Dr Offit said, "The nasal influenza vaccine provides more protection than the injected vaccine, and it is most effective in children who have never been exposed to the influenza virus. "Therefore, the development of nasal vaccines in the NextGen project is very promising, but manufacturing nasal vaccines is not easy.
It is reported that the Biden administration's NextGen project, like the "Operation Warp Speed" released by the Trump administration in the early days of the epidemic, was characterized as an intergovernment agency project, involving public-private partnerships.
In March 2020, the Trump administration spent about $30 billion during the height of the pandemic to launch Operation Warp Speed, which aims to develop, manufacture and distribute coronavirus vaccines.
They are basically betting on six pharmaceutical companies, hoping that at least a few of them will succeed. The six companies each received more than $1 billion in funding (Moderna and BioNTech successfully developed vaccines without government funding) and pledged to secure markets for their vaccines at the government level if they succeeded.
Among them, Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech completed development, testing, and regulatory approval in less than a year, producing millions of doses of mRNA vaccines and saving many lives.
Johnson & Johnson has developed a DNA vaccine that, while effective, has severe side effects and is no longer widely used in the United States. Novavax has also developed a vaccine and received emergency approval, although the technology is not yet widely available.
Two other companies, Sanofi and AstraZeneca, were out of the game during initial testing.
In the end, Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech won a big victory in this pandemic.
Resources
White House to invest $5 billion in next-generation COVID vaccines. Here's why we need new ones. USA TODAY
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/04/10/project-next-generation-coronavirus-vaccines-biden-administration/11636925002/