Scientists are reporting good news all around regarding both a potential treatment and vaccine for COVID-19. While one study shows antibodies from llamas can neutralize the virus leading to COVID-19, another is already yielding positive results in actual test subjects, according to multiple media outlets.
Daniel Wrapp, the co-author of the study with llamas, told Vermont Public Radio the hope is to administer COVID-19 patients an antibody found to be smaller, more stable, and more effective than human antibodies. Wrapp's best estimate for how long it would take for an approved therapeutic to reach the market is about one year.
"We are actively performing pre-clinical trials, testing for protection in hamsters. If that looks good, we'll move into non-human primates," he said. "And if that looks good, we'll begin phase-one clinical testing in humans."
Wrapp told Vermont Public Radio an “effective vaccine” may be several years away. “But at the moment, even if we did have an effective vaccine, there are so many people currently infected, that a vaccine wouldn't be useful to those people,” he said. “So we would need to be able to quickly administer them a treatment so they can reduce disease burden and fight off the virus more quickly.”
It does appear that work toward a vaccine is moving along a more accelerated path. Moderna, a biotech company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, vaccinated dozens of human test subjects and found antibodies that neutralized the virus in all eight of the participants subjected to further antibody measuring, CNN reported. "We've demonstrated that these antibodies, this immune response, can actually block the virus," Moderna’s chief medical officer Dr. Tal Zaks told CNN. "I think this is a very important first step in our journey towards having a vaccine."
Zaks said if future research goes well, Moderna could have a vaccine available as early as January. It is one of eight developers—two others in the United States, one in Britain, and four in China—doing human clinical trials with a coronavirus vaccine. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared Moderna to start Phase 2 of its trials, which usually tests several hundred people, and the company is set to increase that testing to tens of thousands in Phase 3 in July, CNN reported. Of the other two companies developing vaccines in the United States, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer plans to finish its Phase 1 clinical trial in mid-July, and the biotech company Inovio hopes to start Phase 2/3 efficacy trials this summer.
President Donald Trump has in many ways pitted the companies against each other in declaring a race to a vaccination he dubbed Operation Warp Speed. He said Friday during a White House briefing that "we'd love" to see a proven coronavirus vaccine "prior to the end of the year," according to the Detroit Free Press.
Dr. Kirsten Lyke, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health who has been working with Pfizer, told the newspaper that it's hard to promise a vaccine by January. "We just don't know what the result is going to be," she said. "It's science. We can't predict. I mean we have a very, very aggressive timeline. And we're on track right now with our timeline but ... anything could set it back. ... There may be a safety issue. It may not be eliciting the proper immunity. There's so many potential vaccines that haven't gone into human trials yet. There's a handful that have."