Good news on the anvil: Coronavirus vaccine in sight
The recent news of volunteers from Pune administering the Oxford University Coronavirus vaccine has unsurprisingly flown below the radar of television news. This variant of the vaccine is being developed by Oxford University, with the collaboration of a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company called AstraZeneca.
The vaccine is reported to produce a safe immune response in its early trials, thus it has moved to advanced phase-3 trials which the volunteers in Pune are a part of. They are part of the thousands of volunteers around the globe who will be either given the vaccine or administered a placebo vaccine. They will then be observed to compare the effectiveness of both the vaccines to detect the one providing more immunity against the Coronavirus.
The vaccine works on essentially the same notion that administering a weakened version of a virus can train the body to fight the real virus. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is designed to train the human immune system to create an immune response against the COVID-19’s “spike proteins”. It also carries a chimpanzee cold virus called the Adenovirus. When injected in a human body, the Adenovirus makes the human cells create spikes that are similar to the ones present on the Coronavirus. The human body then develops an immune response to the adenovirus spikes and in turn, develops the capability to fight against Coronavirus.
The volunteers administering this vaccine developed antibodies that bind with the infected cells and render the virus inert. At the same time, they also produced ‘T-cells’ which seek and destroy the infected cells to cull the replication and further spread of the virus within the human body.
AstraZeneca has announced their plans to produce a billion doses themselves to assist in the inoculation of the low-income population. India’s Serum Institute has agreed to produce a billion doses as well. CSL, a vaccine manufacturer from Australia is developing a vaccine with the help of The University of Queensland, who has also indicated that they can assist in the manufacturing of the Oxford vaccine on a larger scale.
However, the Oxford vaccine does come with certain constraints. Since it consists of virus particles, it needs to be stored in temperatures below negative 70 degrees celsius, which could hinder the transportation and storage of the vaccine in parts of the world that do not have resources to create such suitable conditions. It is yet to be tested on the elderly, who are the most susceptible to infection. Thus, its effect on them remains to be seen.
