Moderna, a Boston-based biotech company, has shipped the first batches of a COVID-19 vaccine to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and one patient will be given an experimental dose of it Monday.
Full-scale human trials of Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine are expeced to start as early as April, using 45 young, healthy volunteers, reports The Guardian. A finished vaccine is not expected to be ready for the general public for at least a year.
About 35 companies and academic institutions are in the rush to create a vaccine, with at least four tests have been conducted on animals.
RNA vaccines work by introducing an mRNA sequence, or the molecule which tells cells what to build, according to the University of Cambridge. The sequence is coded for a disease-specific antigen, and once that is recognized by the immune system, it fights a virus, according to the University of Cambridge.
Participants cannot get infected from such vaccines, but the trials will be held to be sure no side effects occur. The volunteers being tested through Moderna will be monitored for about a year before the medication is released to the general public.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization says a vaccine won't be ready for another 18 months.
Scientists from China first shared the virus's genome sequence in early January, which has allowed researchers to grow the virus.
Richard Hatchett, CEO of an Oslo, Norway-based nonprofit, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is leading efforts to finance and coordinate the development of a vaccine, said the speed of building the vaccines builds "very much" on work that has been done on prototype pathogens after the SARS and MERS epidemics. Moderna's vaccine was also built from early work on the MERS virus.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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