Washington (AFP)
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Johnson & Johnson group have started the development of potential vaccines against the new coronavirus that has appeared in China, 2019-nCoV, a work that will take months, officials announced on Tuesday.
"We have already started the development of a vaccine at the NIH and with many of our collaborators," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, at a press conference in Washington.
The development is being carried out in collaboration with the biotech company Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also funded for this project by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a public-private partnership organization.
Anthony Fauci agreed that it was possible that the epidemic would decline before the vaccine was ready, as was the case during the SARS epidemic in 2002/2003.
It will take three months to launch a phase 1 trial, then three months to obtain data, before possibly launching a phase 2 trial on a larger number of people, said the doctor.
But "we are moving forward as if we should deploy the vaccine," he said. "We are considering the worst-case scenario, in case it becomes a bigger epidemic."
Like Secretary of Health Alex Azar at the same press conference, he called on Chinese scientists to improve cooperation with American researchers.
Shortly after, the World Health Organization and the Chinese government announced that they had agreed to send international experts to China. Washington had asked Beijing as early as January 6 to send its own epidemic experts, according to Alex Azar.
Johnson & Johnson chief scientist Paul Stoffels said on Tuesday in a statement to AFP that the laboratory was working on a vaccine, using the same technology as that used for the Ebola vaccine, now administered in the Republic Democrat of Congo and Rwanda.
"The same technology was also used to make our vaccine candidates against Zika and HIV," he wrote.
© 2020 AFP