LONDON/BERLIN - The life-and-death sprint to find a drug that can protect us all from Covid-19 is a contest in which there ought to be no losers.
Yet the unprecedented efforts of the world’s scientists and drug companies to create a coronavirus vaccine have culminated in a familiar rivalry, says the British daily The Telegraph - “a playoff between teams in England and Germany”.
The race to produce the first fully licenced vaccine to protect against the new coronavirus may come down to a playoff between teams in England and Germany.
Kate Bingham, chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, the body in charge of the UK’s vaccine strategy, said on Monday that two groups - one in Oxford and one in Mainz, Germany - were running head to head and may yet see their immunisations approved before the end of December.
“I think we have a shot of getting a vaccine this year,” Ms Bingham told Sky News. “There's two potential candidates, one would be the Oxford candidate and the other one is the German vaccine from BioNTech.”
These candidates are among six the UK has already ordered (with a total of 340 million doses) as a means of hedging its bets against candidates returning poor data in phase three trials.
Ms Bingham said she was “very optimistic” about all six vaccines, which use four different technologies to fight Sars-Cov-2. She said early results from three were encouraging but singled out the Oxford and German teams as the most advanced.
“Those are the two that, if everything works, could potentially be both registered and delivered this year,” she said, with the caveat that “it is most likely to be next year, though.”
While the Oxford vaccine has received huge media coverage, the candidate being trialled by the German biotech company BioNTech has attracted fewer headlines.
Unlike the Oxford candidate, which requires a conventional manufacturing process, the German vaccine is an mRNA-based product. If proven to work, it can be synthesised in a laboratory at greater speed - a major advantage when almost eight billion people across the globe may need a jab.
It’s a platform Thomas Strüngmann, BioNTech’s biggest shareholder, has claimed could make it “the Amazon of vaccines”.
Both products have completed successful phase one and two trials, with data suggesting they produced a “robust” immune response - antibodies and T-cells - in volunteers after two doses.
The teams are now conducting phase three trials in which tens of thousands of people in multiple locations around the world receive the jabs to demonstrate their safety at scale and their ability - not just to provoke an immune response - but to protect against the virus.
Dr Nick Jackson, head of programmes and technology at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), said one of the “distinct advantages” that both teams had was partnerships with big pharmaceutical businesses - something that had enabled them to scale up fast.
