- The Chumakov Center is preparing a version of the coronavirus vaccine against the delta strain. How will the CoviVac vaccine be modified?
- First of all, this is not a modification (vaccine. -
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), it is the creation of a new vaccine. In fact, the coronavirus is a young virus, but, as you know, it is quite actively spreading around the globe. During this spread, the virus mutates. The world medical community now knows both "alphas" and "deltas", and already other names. The community assesses both the contagiousness (the ability to infect. -
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) and the pathogenicity (the ability to lead to serious diseases. -
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) of the virus. That is why today all of us are faced with the question of studying these individual strains.
After the "delta" strain had invaded and replaced other strains, it became necessary to see what it was.
We are again working with Kommunarka (City Clinical Hospital No. 40. -
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), where we plan to create our own clinical department in the near future.
We were able to isolate the delta strain in patients with coronavirus.
The delta strain is the basis for the development of vaccines.
Then you need to go all the way that we went with the previous strain - with "alpha".
Learn to cultivate (grow) a strain, "pass through" at least seven times in order to achieve a certain stability of its life.
After that, it will be necessary to re-conduct preclinical and clinical studies.
It is quite possible that we will follow a complex path, that is, at some stage, one drug will contain a combination of two strains.
While this is not very clear.
The virus is new, it is young, it is growing, it is changing, and it has not yet reached its final stable form, so all our actions are aimed at monitoring all its new changes, cataloging, learning how to work with them and further making the following decisions.
- If a new vaccine is created and it undergoes a series of clinical trials, when will it be approximately ready?
- In a year.
- Will it be necessary to modify the old one or make a new version of the vaccine with the advent of a new strain?
- The virus is young, it is changing, and we do not yet know at what point it can stop.
Will it be one strain that will supplant the others, or will it be several strains, like the flu, for example.
Our task today is to isolate the existing strains, cultivate them, and achieve their technological laboratory stability so that they can be used in preparations.
By the way, one of the very important things in this regard is the creation of an industrial collection of strains.
We have such a collection and we are expanding it.
Vaccination against COVID-19
RIA News
© Konstantin Mikhalchevsky
- How effective is the existing CoviVac vaccine against the delta strain?
- We give 80% of the production of antibodies.
Therefore, it is necessary to vaccinate with what is now, in no case wait for something new.
The current arsenal of coronavirus vaccines must be fully utilized.
- The KoviVac vaccine is considered to be in short supply. For example, the website of the Moscow government says at the moment that there is no vaccine available. What is the reason and when will the situation change?
- The situation is very simple.
We represent a research and production complex: the Chumakov Center, or the Poliomyelitis Institute.
Accordingly, we have certain production capacities.
We produce a vaccine, maybe a number of vaccines, for the national immunization schedule, and we have allocated part of this capacity for the production of the vaccine that we have developed.
We received additional equipment a month ago.
As a result, I believe that we will at least be able to double today's production and the starting point will be approximately October 1, that is, from that moment we assume that we will produce about 2.5 million doses per month.
Director of the Chumakov Center for the production of the KoviVac vaccine
- Are other countries interested in the KoviVac vaccine and are you going to promote the KoviVac coronavirus vaccine abroad?
- When the last time we wrote the corresponding reports, we got a figure of one hundred requests from various countries.
There is a problem: in the world, just like in our country, there is a certain lack of appropriate production capacities.
At the same time, not
we must forget that when we talk about foreign sites, we are still talking about the fact that a prerequisite should be the possibility of re-export. After all, we have not completely saturated our own country. Therefore, we simply don’t have to talk about export yet. Today, the main thing is to provide its own population with a vaccine.