Developing a coronavirus vaccine
Rino Rappuoli, GSK
How long until a vaccine for COVID-19, and how is science speeding up the process? Rino Rappuoli, Chief Scientist and Head of Research & Development at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), shares his insights.
2 April 2020
How might the COVID-19 outbreak evolve?
There are several possible scenarios for the evolution of COVID-19. We hope that with hygiene, quarantine and social distancing, plus the start of the summer season, the virus will go away, as we saw in the case of SARS. Unfortunately I believe that this is unlikely – SARS-CoV-2 is present in most countries and all continents, so I believe it will become endemic, at least for a while.
If this happens, there are two possible outcomes. The virus could spread through the population, and the subsequent immunity would make the virus much less dangerous. This is similar to the Zika infection of 2016, which spread through Latin America one summer, infected the entire population who became immune, and the virus disappeared.
The other scenario is that, even if people become immune to the current form of the virus, it will respond by mutating – and if this happens, then existing immunity will not be able to protect people from the new strains of the disease. In a similar way to the influenza virus, we will need to make a new vaccine every year to keep up with the mutating disease.
How long will it take to produce a COVID-19 vaccine?
Vaccine development used to take 15-20 years – however, a recent technological revolution has allowed us to speed up the process significantly. Previously, in order to develop a vaccine, we first needed to spend months isolating the virus, then growing it, killing or inactivating it, and finally manufacturing it, all before we could move on to clinical trials
Today, all we need is the genetic sequence of the virus – which in the case of SARS-CoV-2 was made available by Chinese scientists on January 7. Once we have this sequence, we can immediately use it to make many types of vaccines – some of which can take as little as one week to be ready for testing on animals in laboratory conditions.
However, by this stage we have only completed around 10% of the overall vaccine development process. After initial testing, several months are required to prepare for clinical trials, during which the toxicity of the drug is closely examined, and production is scaled up ready to deliver the drug to human subjects. The clinical trials can then begin, which themselves take many months as we work to ensure that the vaccines are both safe and effective to administer to healthy adults and children.
Under emergency conditions – such as the recent Ebola outbreak – we saw that it is possible to shorten this whole process to 5 years. In fact, using the new technologies, platforms and lessons learned from Ebola, we can probably shorten the timeline even further.
So my prediction for when a COVID-19 vaccine will be available to the general population is between 1 and 3 years. One is very optimistic – I hope that in 1 year to 18 months we will have a vaccine.
What role is GSK taking in the development of a COVID-19 vaccine?
At GSK, we asked ourselves how we could best contribute to the fight against COVID-19. We could enter the race to find a vaccine by developing our own, but this would be duplicating the efforts of many laboratories, biotech companies and academic groups worldwide already working directly on this.
What we can uniquely offer, however, are licensed adjuvants, which are ready to be produced at large scale.
How do adjuvants help?
Adjuvants are substances that we use to improve the efficacy of many different vaccines. In the case of viral vaccines, they increase the number of doses we can make from a volume of the vaccine, as well as decreasing the amount of antigen (the vaccine component which our immune system then recognizes as a virus) required per dose, by around 10 times. Additionally, the subsequent immunity conveyed by the vaccine lasts longer with the addition of adjuvants. From our experience with influenza, SARS, MERS and other viruses, we know that viral vaccines require adjuvants to work effectively.
While we can accelerate vaccine development, we cannot accelerate the development of adjuvants, which take at least 15-20 years to be produced at scale. GSK already has licensed adjuvants, so we decided to make these available to any group in the world with a strong vaccine development plan. Now we have several vaccines under development thanks to our adjuvants – and we are very proud of the fact that not only are we enabling the production of one vaccine, but of many. The more vaccines we have available, the more doses we can manufacture, and the more people we can protect.
How can governments prepare to roll out a COVID-19 vaccine to the population?
Today we can develop vaccines faster, improve the quality of vaccines using adjuvants, and we can get to licensure of vaccines pretty rapidly with today’s technologies. What we still need to do is manufacture the vaccines. To do this, you need a plant, and building a new plant could take 5 years. If we did manage to license a COVID-19 vaccine in the next 12 to 18 months, we still wouldn’t have the capacity to produce the necessary number of doses.
It is therefore critical for governments and other stakeholders to look at increasing our manufacturing capacities, both for COVID-19 and for future emerging diseases.
How can the research community facilitate production of a COVID-19 vaccine?
Overall, I’m confident we’re going to get a vaccine – we have all the technologies, we have support from all agencies involved, and we have the contribution of scientists across all continents. We have seen the importance of sharing scientific information from the beginning, when Chinese researchers made the SARS-CoV-2 genome available on the internet. We should share information on how the virus mutates, the different vaccines being developed, the types of immunities generated – it’s only by working together as a worldwide scientific community that we can curb COVID-19 through vaccination.
Watch Rino Rappuoli’s webinar for more on developing a COVID-19 vaccine:
Rino Rappuoli is Chief Scientist and Head External R&D at GSK Vaccines, based in Siena, Italy and Professor of Vaccines Research, Imperial College, London. He is elected member of the Royal Society of London, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). He was nominated third most influential person worldwide in the field of vaccines (Terrapin). He has published 700 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He introduced novel scientific concepts: genetic detoxification; cellular microbiology; reverse vaccinology; pangenome. Developed licensed vaccines: acellular pertussis-containing a non-toxic mutant of pertussis toxin; the first conjugate vaccine against meningococcus C and the first vaccine for meningococcus B, for which both vaccines the United Kingdom has been forerunner in introducing them for mass immunization; MF59, the first vaccine adjuvant after aluminium salts; CRM197 that is used as carrier in many conjugate vaccines. Dr. Rappuoli is the Founder of the GSK Vaccines Institute for Global Health (GVGH). »See full bio & publications