Bloomberg Businessweek - USA (2021-02-08)

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Bloomberg Businessweek February 8, 2021

his science advisor Eric Lander, a renowned genomics

expert with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

4. Developing more vaccines, faster
   Vaccines have been the most spectacular success story so far in
   the current pandemic. There are already two highly effective
   options on the U.S. market, and a third vaccine from Johnson
   & Johnson could be cleared within weeks, after the company
   reported Phase III results on Jan. 29 showing that it generated
   strong protection against severe Covid. Yet there’s clear oppor-
   tunity for improvement. “We need to have strategies that allow
   us to move even faster,” says David Ho, who leads the Aaron
   Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia. Ho estimates we
   could have easily shaved four to five months from the drug and
   vaccine timeline had more preparation taken place.
   Early investment in mRNA technology by the U.S.
   government helped Moderna Inc. bring its vaccine candidate
   tohumantrialsina record 66 days.Butit stillrequiredmore
   thanfourmonthsofPhaseI andPhaseII trialstoconfirm
   safetyandfindtherightdosebeforethecrucialPhaseIII

g , y ,

butModernacouldhavetestedcandidatesforknowncorona-

virusesaheadoftime,whichmighthaveallowedit tostart

a large Phase  III trial months earlier, according to CEO

Stéphane Bancel. “Fall would have looked so different if we

had a vaccine in July,” he says.

Bancel figures it would cost $200 million to $300 million to

bring prototype mRNA vaccines for the 10 most worrisome

virus classes through early human trials, so that with a few

tweaks, they’d be ready for large-scale testing. It might cost

another $1 billion or $2 billion to maintain a spare manufac-

turing plant along with a stockpile of raw materials for mil-

lions of doses. In January, in a small start toward this goal,

Moderna announced that it’s begun work on a vaccine for the

Nipah virus, which has killed hundreds in multiple outbreaks

in Asia since 1999.

Bancel’s proposal is similar to the concept Glaxo tried

to sell Barda on back in 2017. A spokeswoman for the

Department of Health and Human Services says that at the

time, Barda’s funding from Congress was focused on defend-

ing against influenza and biological, chemical, and radiolog-

ical weapons; it’s now soliciting proposals for coronavirus

countermeasures, including vaccines. Some people also saw

the proposal as too tightly linked to one company and in com-

petition with groups such as CEPI, which has backing from

the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others to develop

vaccines against emerging threats. Glaxo declined to go into

detail on why it couldn’t attract funding, but in a statement

it said it’s committed to pandemic-related research efforts.

One tantalizing area for future investment: vaccines and

drugs that offer protection against multiple viruses. The

existingCovidvaccines spur antibodies against the unique

spikeproteinthevirus uses to enter cells. Researchers

could instead create a shot that triggers an immune

ponse against the stem of these spikes,

hich varies much less between strains,

llowing protection against numerous

Covid-like illnesses at once, according to

ineet Menachery, a corona virus specialist

heUniversity of Texas Medical Branch at

veston. It’s tricky and it might not work,

potential payoff would be immense. In

vember the National Institutes of Health

nounced plans to fund research into

ad-acting coronavirus vaccines.

Something similar should be done with

aldrugs, says Ralph Baric, a coronavirus

earcher at the University of North Carolina

crucial research before the pandemic

wing that remdesivir, an anti viral devel-

d by Gilead Sciences Inc. to fight Ebola, was

mising against coronaviruses. Remdesivir

cleared for the U.S. market on May 1 in part

ause it had already been tested extensively

patients during a 2018 outbreak in the DRC,

y trials targeting Covid were required. But

remdesivirmustbeadministered through an IV, which has

limiteditsusetohospitalized patients. Merck & Co. is work-

ing on a coronavirus drug that could be taken as a pill, but

unlike Gilead’s medicine, it hadn’t yet started Phase I trials at

the start of the pandemic, putting it on a much slower path.

Efficacy trial results are expected by April.

5. Ironing out distribution and logistics
   Getting tests and vaccines to people isn’t rocket science. It’s
   not even regular science. But adapting logistics in a medical
   system as large and complicated as that of the U.S. can take
   months of advance planning and coordination, and databases
   must be developed to keep track of everything. Not enough

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