Posted on Tuesday, February 11, 2020 at 2:50 p.m.
Through Sudinfo with Belga
Researchers at Imperial College London believe they are among the first to test mice for new coronavirus vaccines, and hope to have a vaccine available by the end of the year, said one. AFP researchers.
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The epidemic has claimed more than a thousand lives in mainland China since the announcement of the first death on January 11, attributed to the 2019-nCoV virus.
“We have just injected the mice that we generated from bacteria into mice, and we hope that over the next few weeks we will be able to determine the reaction in these mice, in their blood, their response in terms of antibodies to the coronavirus, “Paul McKay, a researcher at Imperial College, told AFP.
Researchers around the world are engaged in a race to find a vaccine, a painstaking process that usually takes several years, because it involves proving that the vaccine is safe and effective before it can be mass produced. The Imperial College team believes the tests they conduct on mice are among the first of their kind.
According to the Chinese agency Xinhua, a university in Shanghai also launched tests on mice on Sunday.
Imperial College researchers hope to be the first to do clinical trials in humans and come up with an available vaccine. They rely on their research on severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) started two decades ago to advance their work. “We hope to be the first to conduct clinical trials in humans of this particular vaccine,” said McKay. “After the first phase of testing, which can take a few months, we can immediately test the vaccine’s effectiveness on humans, which will also take a few months. So maybe by the end of the year there will be a viable vaccine that can be used on humans, “added the researcher.
If researchers from all over the world are working on the subject, for Paul McKay, it is a “collaborative race”, with a “cross-sharing of information”. “The Chinese, as soon as they sequenced the genome, shared it freely with everyone, so the competitive side is probably not right. I would say it’s a collaborative race, “concluded the researcher.
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