To scientists, the work to create a vaccine against the new coronavirus is advancing with a speed they could barely have imagined a decade ago. “Traditional vaccine development efforts have usually taken decades, not months,” said Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, which hopes to have a vaccine in human testing by April. Eight years ago, he and his co-director, Maria Elena Bottazzi, won federal funding to create a vaccine against SARS, a coronavirus that emerged in 2002 and infected 8,000 people and killed nearly 800. By 2016, they had manufactured enough of the potential vaccine to get through toxicology tests and human safety trials. “The actual technical feat of making a vaccine against this virus is probably not going to be that hard,” Hotez said.

Source: Washington Post January 30, 2020 16:08 UTC