Gina Kolata
07/26/2021 2:54 PM
Clarín.com
The New York Times International Weekly
Updated 07/26/2021 2:54 PM
In a sense, the world has been lucky with the new coronavirus.
By sheer chance, scientists have spent
years studying coronaviruses
and have developed exactly the tools needed to make COVID vaccines as soon as the genetic sequence of the virus was published.
But what if the next pandemic comes from a virus that causes
Lassa fever, or from the Sudanese strain of Ebola, or from a Nipah virus
?
Vaccine research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston's Center for Virology and Vaccine Research last year.
Photo Tony Luong for The New York Times.
Dr.
Anthony Fauci
, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is promoting an ambitious and expensive plan to prepare for those
nightmare scenarios.
It would cost "a few billion dollars" a year, it would take five years to get the first crop of results, and it would have a huge staff of scientists, he said.
The idea is to make
"prototype"
vaccines
that protect against
viruses from about 20 families
that could trigger a new pandemic.
Using the research tools that worked well in the case of COVID-19, researchers would discover the
molecular structure
of each virus, learn where antibodies should attack, and learn how to induce the body to produce exactly those antibodies.
"If we get the funding, which I think we do, it's likely to start in 2022," Fauci said, adding that he has been promoting the idea "in discussions with the White House and others."
Dr.
Francis Collins,
director of the
National Institutes of Health
, also considered it likely that the necessary funds will be allocated, calling the project "compelling."
"As we begin to contemplate a successful end to the COVID-19 pandemic, we must not become
complacent again
," Collins said.
Much of the financial support would come from the Fauci institute, but a project of this magnitude would require additional funds that would have to be allocated by Congress.
This year's budget for the infectious diseases institute is just over
$ 6 billion.
Fauci did not specify how much additional money would be needed.
If surveillance networks detect a new virus spreading from animals to people, logic says scientists could stop it by immunizing people in the outbreak by rapidly manufacturing the prototype vaccine.
And if the virus were to spread before the world realized what was happening, prototype vaccines could
be more widely deployed.
"The name of the game would be to try to restrict the spread to outbreaks," said Dr. Dennis Burton, a vaccine researcher and chair of the department of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute.
The
vaccine prototype project
is the work of Dr. Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
He presented the idea in February 2017 at a private meeting of institute directors.
Year after year, viruses had threatened to turn into pandemics, Graham said:
H1N1 swine flu in 2009, Chikungunya in 2012, MERS in 2013, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2016.
Each time, scientists were quick to try to make a vaccine.
Their only success was partial, with an Ebola vaccine that helped control the epidemic but will
not work
against other Ebola strains.
The other epidemics subsided before vaccines could be made or tested.
"We were tired," Graham said.
New weapons
But researchers had new tools developed in the last decade that could make a big difference.
They allowed scientists to see the molecular structures of viruses, isolate the antibodies that block them, and find out where they bind.
The result was the ability to make "structure-based design" for new vaccines that would target the pathogen with greater precision.
When he heard Graham's approach in 2017, Fauci was inspired.
"It seemed to me and others on the executive committee to be really doable," Fauci said.
Graham published a review article outlining the proposal in
Nature
Immunology
in 2018.
But without the urgency of a looming pandemic, his idea stayed there.
Now, however, many think that the time has come.
The Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases has created a spreadsheet for each of the 20 virus families that shows what is known about the anatomy and vulnerabilities of each pathogen, said Dr. John Mascola, director of the Research Center of Institute vaccines.
"For each family of viruses, we are in a
different state
of vaccine
knowledge and development
," Mascola said.
The Lassa fever and Nipah virus vaccines, for example, are in their early stages.
Chikungunya and Zik
a
vaccines
are more advanced.
The work to fill the gaps in vaccine development would be done with research grants to academic scientists.
"There's a lot of excitement" among academic researchers, said Dr. Barton Haynes, director of the Duke Institute for Human Vaccines.
Although the proposal is not well known to the general public, Fauci said he has discussed it in talks with scientific audiences.
Association
The program would also establish
collaboration agreements with pharmaceutical companies
to rapidly produce vaccine prototypes, Fauci said.
That is what happened with the COVID-19 vaccines.
The epidemics of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) led scientists to work on a coronavirus vaccine.
This led to the discovery that coronaviruses use a spike-shaped protein to infect cells, but the spike
changes shape easily
and needs to stay in position to be useful as a vaccine.
The researchers found that this could be done with small molecular changes in the spike protein.
Days after
the publication of the sequence of the new coronavirus, scientists had designed vaccines to combat it.
That, Fauci said, is what pandemic preparedness can do.
He would like to have vaccine prototypes for
10 of the 20 virus families
in the first five years of work.
"It would take quite large sums of money," Fauci acknowledged.
"But after what we've been through, it's not out of the question."
c.2021 The New York Times Company
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