Anthony Fauci promotes the creation of “prototype vaccines” against families of viruses that could cause future pandemics

The onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic at the end of 2019 took scientists well prepared as coronaviruses had been studied for years before and this allowed for the development of vaccines with a speed never seen before. But now, several researchers are starting to think about what will happen if other viruses get out of hand in the years to come without prior research being done.

El director del Instituto Nacional de Alergias y Enfermedades Infecciosas, Anthony Fauci, está pidiendo a las autoridades de EEUU que liberen fondos por varios miles de millones de dólares para que en los próximos 5 años sea posible prepararse para afrontar una nueva pandemia a traverses de la creation of “Vaccine prototypes” deal with the possible appearance of other viruses.

The scientist, principal adviser to the President of the United States, Joe Biden, on issues of the current pandemic, said the project will demand “a few billion dollars” a year from the country and take about five years to achieve results, thanks to the work of a very large group of scientists.

The initiative will consist in manufacturing “prototype vaccines” against some twenty families of viruses likely to generate a new pandemic. The scientific tools that would be used would be the same ones that were successful in developing the inoculants against COVID-19. Researchers must discover the molecular structure of each virus and learn how to generate the exact antibodies in the human body to fight these viruses.

“If we get the funding, which I think we will, it will probably start in 2022,” Fauci revealed, adding that he had promoted the idea “in discussions with the White House and other” US state agencies.

For the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, the “convincing” Fauci project and he considered it probable that he would obtain the necessary funds. “As we begin to envision a successful end to the COVID-19 pandemic, we must not go back to complacency,” Collins said.

The big barrier that Fauci will have to cross will be to gain the support of members of Congress to approve a multi-million dollar budget. The project would start from the institute managed by the infectious disease specialist, but it will require additional funds which will have to be accepted by representatives of Congress. As revealed by The New York Times, this year’s budget for the Institute of Infectious Diseases is just over $ 6 billion, but Fauci did not specify how much more money would be needed.

The new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, responsible for the COVID-19 disease, kills more than 4.1 million worldwide and more than 194 million people are infected. Several scientists have warned that there is a risk of a recurrence of a pandemic with another type of virus. With this in mind, the Fauci initiative was born which would make it possible to advance in the creation of vaccines.

Although the development of COVID-19 vaccines has been achieved in record fashion, countries are making uneven progress in immunization, as most of the people who have agreed to be vaccinated live in developed countries. Based on data from Our world in data, the worldwide number of doses administered exceeds 3,830 million injections. The vaccination campaign is progressing in around 200 countries around the world, but with a big difference in access depending on the continent. Vaccination is particularly prevalent in the European Union, where over 57% of the population already has at least one dose, followed by North America with 46% and, further, Latin America with 39% and Asia with 26%. In contrast, Africa has barely managed to vaccinate just over 3% of its population.

According to the criteria of the leading infectious disease specialist in the United States, if a new virus with the ability to transmit from animals to humans is detected in the future, its contagion could be blocked so as to produce only an epidemic of this disease. and no longer an epidemic, a pandemic, which implies a global reach. Scientists could stop it by quickly immunizing people with these “prototype vaccines” that will already be manufactured. The previous existence of these inoculants would allow much faster manufacture, distribution and application of vaccines than the already record high of the current pandemic.

“The name of the game would be to try to limit the contagion effects to epidemics,” he said. Dennis Burton, vaccine researcher and chair of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology, Scripps Research Institute. The vaccine prototype project is the result of Barney Graham, Deputy Director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He presented the idea in February 2017 at a private meeting of high school principals.

Graham is the one who warned that every year there are viruses that threaten to become pandemics, as happened with the H1N1 swine flu in 2009; Chikungunya in 2012; MERS, in 2013; Ebola, in 2014; Zika, in 2016. Every time, scientists rushed to try to make a vaccine. Its only success has been partial, with an Ebola vaccine that helped control the outbreak, but would not work against other strains of Ebola. The other epidemics subsided before vaccines could be made or tested.

But researchers have developed new tools over the past decade that could make a big difference. They have allowed scientists to see the molecular structures of viruses, isolate the antibodies that block viruses, and find out where they bind. The result has been the ability to perform a “structure-based design” of new vaccines that target the pathogen with greater precision.

Fauci was inspired by Graham’s idea, he said. “It seemed to me and other members of the executive committee something really doable,” he said. Graham has published a review article describing the proposal in Nature Immunology in 2018. Back then, the idea didn’t come to fruition, but now maybe he could get it back on track.

El instituto de alergias y enfermedades infecciosas ha creado una hoja de cálculo para cada una de las 20 familias de viruses que muestra lo que se sabe la anatomía y las vulnerabilidades de cada patógeno, dijo John Mascola, director of the Centro de Investigación de Vacunas del high school. “For each family of viruses, we are in a different state of vaccine knowledge and development,” he said. Vaccines against Lassa fever and Nipah virus, for example, are in their infancy. The vaccines against Chikungunya and Zika are more advanced.

Work to fill gaps in vaccine development would be done with research grants for academic scientists. “There is a lot of enthusiasm” among university researchers, he said. Barton Haynes, Director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. Although the proposal is not well known to the general public, Fauci said he discussed it in discussions with a scientific audience.

The program would also establish collaborative agreements with pharmaceutical companies to rapidly produce vaccine prototypes, Fauci said. The SARS and MERS epidemics prompted scientists to work on a vaccine against the coronavirus. This led to the discovery that coronaviruses use a spike protein to infect cells, but the spike easily changes shape and must be held in position to be useful as a vaccine. It could be done, the researchers found, with small molecular changes in the spike protein.

A few days after the release of the sequence for the new coronavirus, scientists had designed vaccines to fight it, Fauci recalled, this is what pandemic preparedness can do. He would like to have prototype vaccines for 10 of the 20 virus families in the first five years of work. “It would require a lot of money,” Fauci admitted. “But after what we’ve been through, it’s not out of the question.”

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