In Seattle, US, a new phase one clinical trial of a vaccine, mRNA-1273, for the COVID-19 has started, as the first person to enroll in the trial has already received the vaccine. Meanwhile, China, where the new strain of Coronavirus emerged in December 2019, has given green signal to human trials of a potential vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2.
The Asian country agreed to begin the vaccine trial with an aim to produce a cure against COVID-19 epidemic that has killed more than 7,000 people worldwide.
The COVID-19 vaccine trial
As per the reports, the researchers at Academy of Military Medical Sciences in China which is affiliated to the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has received approval from the government to begin the early-stage of clinical trials of the potential new Coronavirus vaccine from this week, said People's Daily.
In US, which is one of most affected countries, scientists started the clinical trial of a potential vaccine on Monday, March 16, which is developed by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the biotech firm Moderna Inc.
Recently, reports claimed that researchers in Iran have developed a drug combination to heal the lesions in the lungs of Novel Coronavirus patients. As per Xinhua, Iran's head of the scientific committee to combat COVID-19, Mostafa Qanei said the "complex" is the combination of three drugs which could reduce the period of hospitalisation of the patients and added that after applying the drug 40 percent of the patients left hospital four days earlier. It should me mentioned that in Iran, there are 16,169 infection cases of COVID-19 and 988 deaths till now.
China's race to develop Coronavirus cure
As per Chinese clinical trial registration database, a phase one test will include the examination of whether a dose of experimental COVID-19 vaccine is safe or not for the humans. China is aiming to recruit 108 healthy people to take part in this trial program between March 16 and December 31.
It should be noted that the potential Coronavirus vaccine trial will be conducted by China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences and the Hong Kong-listed biotech company CanSino Biologics. But as per the World Health Organization (WHO), a fully tested and clinically safe vaccine against the COVID-19 will take time to hit the market, not before the middle of 2021.
Experts on vaccine for Coronavirus
A virologist at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, Benjamin Neuman, said that there has never been an extremely successful human vaccine against any members of the Coronavirus family and to create a new cure against the COVID-19 will take longer time.
Earlier, the co-director of the Centre for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital, Dr Peter Hotez, testified before the US House Science, Space and Technology Committee and said, "We had the vaccine ready to go" in 2016 but that time nobody cared or found anything interesting about the Coronavirus vaccine, so it never reached the clinical trial stage. He mentioned that now they again try to get the funding for the vaccine research but now "we will have the lag." As per Dr Hotez, the COVID-19 vaccine trials will take time as the process needs to be monitored with extreme care and attention.
