New vaccines may not require needles or cold storage: WHO chief scientist

New Covid-19 vaccines, including those that don’t require needles and can be stored at room temperature, could be ready for use later this year or next year, the Organization’s lead scientist said world health.

Six to eight new vaccinations could complete clinical studies and be subject to regulatory review by the end of the year, said Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist of the Geneva-based agency, in an interview on Saturday. .

New vaccines will be added to the 10 already proven effective in the year following the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic. The world needs more vaccinations, especially as the continued circulation of the virus spawns dangerous new variants and drug makers struggle to keep orders. Only 122 countries have started vaccinating people, according to data collected by Bloomberg.

“We are delighted with the vaccines we have,” said Swaminathan, an Indian pediatrician best known for her research on tuberculosis and HIV. But “we can still improve,” she said. “I think until 2022 we will see the emergence of improved vaccines.”

The current crop of experimental vaccines uses alternative technologies and delivery systems, and includes more single inoculations and vaccines delivered orally, via a nasal spray, and through the skin using some type of patch. These could provide vaccinations better suited to specific groups, such as pregnant women, according to Swaminathan.

More than 80 candidate vaccines are being studied in humans, although some are still in the early stages of testing and may not be successful. Companies with previously used Covid-19 vaccines have also started testing updated versions designed to thwart variants of the coronavirus that have emerged in recent months.

Recall shots

“We must continue to support research and development of more vaccine candidates, especially as the need for continued booster vaccination of populations is not yet very clear at this stage,” Swaminathan said. “So we have to be prepared for this in the future.”

The WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization is reviewing whether people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 should receive two doses of the vaccine. Some research indicates that a natural infection works to prime the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, much like a first dose, making a second injection unnecessary.

Giving a single dose of vaccine to Covid-19 survivors could free up more supplies, Swaminathan said, although this could present “practical and logistical challenges in many countries” if blood tests are needed to measure levels of antibodies from patients before deciding whether a second vaccine is guaranteed.

The deployment of safe and effective vaccines also raises questions about how to effectively and ethically conduct clinical trials of investigational vaccines, she said. Placebos will be replaced with a “gold standard” vaccine in a so-called non-inferiority design when it is no longer ethical to use a placebo, Swaminathan said.

Global trial

In the meantime, one approach the WHO is exploring is to compare three or four candidate vaccines simultaneously with a placebo. A similar study design was used to test the effectiveness of drug therapies for Covid-19, and may mean that trial participants would have an 80% chance of receiving an investigational vaccine and only a 20% chance of get a placebo.

“We are currently in talks with several companies with vaccines in development to see if we could launch something like this on a global trial platform,” Swaminathan said, adding that she was optimistic that a such a study could begin in the first half of 2021.

A global trial involving a wide range of people and countries offers several advantages, she said. Testing vaccines in various ethnicities, age groups and people with different medical conditions makes the results more generalizable, and when the epidemic decreases in some parts of the world, it is often still active in others, he said. she declared.

(This story was not edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)