Christophe d’Enfert, scientific director of the Pasteur Institute, assures that research is not ready to find a 2019-nCoV coronavirus vaccine. According to him it will take more than a year and a half to develop it.
“It is estimated that it will take 18 to 20 months to succeed” to a vaccine against the coronavirus 2019-nCoV, said Wednesday February 5 in the evening on franceinfo Christophe d’Enfert, scientific director of the Pasteur institute. Christophe d’Enfert believes that other treatments could be effective in stemming the epidemic, such as antivirals. The Pasteur Institute calls for donations to finance research on the new coronavirus.
franceinfo: Are we about to find a vaccine against this new coronavirus?
Christophe d’Enfert: To say that we are about to find a vaccine is an exaggeration. We have known the virus genome sequence for two or three weeks, so we can start to work on the development of a vaccine but it will take time, first because we have to produce this vaccine, then because that we must evaluate its efficacy in animals, and once we have been able to show that our vaccination approach works in animals, we will have to embark on clinical studies in humans after which we will be able to say whether or not the vaccine is effective in humans and whether or not it can be used in the human population. So we are far from an available vaccine. It is estimated that it will take 18 to 20 months to achieve this, if everything works as we would like it to work.
Is there a competition between laboratories to find a vaccine?
I would not speak of competition, but rather of the desire of different teams to take advantage of the different vaccine platforms on which they are experts in developing a vaccine. The development of a vaccine against this coronavirus is considered to be important because if the epidemic continues, it is a means of controlling it.
Is the vaccine the only way to contain the epidemic?
For this coronavirus, the development of a vaccine is an interesting approach, which does not mean that we should not embark on other approaches, and a certain number of teams will be interested in the research of antivirals. The Pasteur Institute will work in this direction too. Antivirals may be an alternative to vaccination to control the epidemic.
–