What if the First Coronavirus Vaccines Aren’t the Best?

“It’s a numbers game — we need a lot of doses,” said Florian Krammer, a virologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

Some of the most promising first-wave products, such as RNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, are based on designs that have never been put into large-scale production before. “The manufacturing math just doesn’t add up,” said Steffen Mueller, the chief scientific officer of Codagenix.

Many of the second-wave vaccines wouldn’t require a large scale-up of experimental manufacturing. Instead, they could piggyback on standard methods that have been used for years to make safe and effective vaccines.

Codagenix, for example, has entered into a partnership with the Serum Institute of India to grow their recoded coronaviruses. The institute already makes billions of doses of live weakened virus vaccines for measles, rotaviruses and influenza, growing them in large tanks of cells.

Tapping into well-established methods could also cut down the cost of a coronavirus vaccine, which will make it easier to get it distributed to less wealthy countries.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, for example, are doing preclinical work on a vaccine that they said might cost as little as $2 a dose. By contrast, Pfizer is charging $19 a dose in a deal with the U.S. government, and other companies have floated even higher prices.

To make the vaccine, the Baylor team engineered yeast to make coronavirus spike tips. It’s precisely the same method that has been used since the 1980s to make vaccines for hepatitis B. The Indian vaccine maker Biological E has licensed Baylor’s vaccine and is planning Phase 1 trials that will start this fall.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/health/covid-19-vaccines.html