How Singapore, India are contributing to a COVID-19 vaccine race
May 25, 2020  11:02
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With the COVID-19 cases zipping past five million people globally last week and rocketing towards six million, the search for a vaccine and a therapy has become more and more urgent.


A paper published by the Imperial College London estimated that the number of people infected by COVID-19 in the UK as of March 30 was between 800,000 to 3.7 million. The official case count then was just 22,141. Even the more conservative actual estimate of 800,000 is 36 times higher than the reported count.Without a vaccine and an effective treatment, we may never get back to life as it used to be.

With new cases in the US and Europe declining, they are starting to gradually re-open their economies.Singapore has started to re-open some but limited businesses and social activities ahead of the official "circuit breaker" end date of June 1. 

There will however not be a sudden relaxation of the lockdown rules on that date - only a very gradual and controlled return to some form of normalcy which the government say will take months.

One of the activities that have not ceased during the lockdown is the search for a vaccine in the city-state which is a leading centre in the region for medical research.

Singapore was involved in the international clinical trial of the Gilead Sciences drug Remdesivir which was initially developed to treat Ebola. Around 100 patients in Singapore were enrolled in the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease led international trial which had about 1,000 patients taking part globally. 

The trial showed that Remdesivir significantly improved recovery prospects of COVID-19 patients.Singapore biotech firm Tychan in partnership with the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), is working with Chugai Pharmaceutical of Japan on a monoclonal antibodies drug.

On the vaccine front, the Singapore Duke-NUS Medical School is working with Arcturus Therapeutics on its mRNA (messenger Ribonucleic Acid) vaccine which has been shown to be highly effective in pre-clinical studies.

RNA vaccines use a relatively new technology that works by introducing an RNA with specific information into the human body that will produce the antigen (a protein from the pathogen) which will then stimulate the immune system to fight the disease.

Another Singaporean biotech firm Esco Aster is developing a chimeric vaccine with US company Vivaldi Biosciences. Chimeric vaccines work by replacing genes from the target pathogen for similar but safe genes from a closely related organism. 

India's Pune-based Serum Institute is not only India's largest biotech company but one of the world's largest. It has the capacity to produce 1.5 billion doses of vaccine annually. It is currently working on three projects to produce COVID-19 vaccines - one is with UK's Oxford University, another with US-based biotech Codagenix, and it is also working on its own vaccine. To save time, it is taking the risk of preparing part of its facilities to be ready to produce between 20-40 million doses as soon as in September although one or more of the vaccines being worked on may not succeed in clinical trials or be approved by health authorities.

Usually, a factory is prepared for manufacturing a vaccine only after the vaccine has been approved as the equipment and set-up needed to produce different vaccines can be quite different. This process can take up to 6 months or more.

It is with this "running in parallel" concept in mind that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding factories to prepare for 7 different vaccines in the hope that it will save time and lives when a vaccine is ready. -- ANI
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