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Within the last few months, hundreds of researchers around the world have begun investigations that would not have existed if it was not for coronavirus.
Some 650 groups are carrying out around 460 trials to see if the compound they are studying has any value in the fight to keep people safe from the virus ravaging the world.
Studies that were on a back-burner have been brought forward and others have been started from nowhere as the need to urgently examine if specific drugs or theoretical applications have any effectiveness.
It is leading to an acceleration in medical science that could have a lasting legacy long after COVID-19 has become a distant, if horrific, memory.
Normally, clinical trials of new drugs - or even repurposed drugs - can take years.
And the development of new vaccines, it is often said, takes an average of 10 years.
But some experts have said that we could have a vaccine for coronavirus by September, as billions of dollars are poured into the race by governments and drug firms around the world.
And other drugs which treat the devastating effects of the virus on the body are being fast-tracked at an unprecedented rate.
It comes at a time when scientists are collaborating and communicating in ever more innovative ways – driven to do so by the looming threat of a pandemic that could kill millions.
Experts say it has only happened because the scientific community has been able to learn the lessons from earlier attempts to get on top of previous health crises like Ebola and Zika, which scared the world into action.
Tens of thousands are now dying every week.
Trudie Lang, professor of global health research at the University of Oxford, said: "We did learn a massive amount in Ebola and Zika outbreaks about how to do research quickly.
"It usually takes 18 months to set up a clinical trial.
"In Ebola, we did the first trials in outbreaks and we got those running in 16 weeks.
"Here [with coronavirus] they've been set up within weeks, like two or three weeks. That's amazing."
Vaccines
Two of the five types of vaccine which are being worked on have never been licensed for use in humans before.
If one of those is the type that ends up protecting the human race from the virus in future, it will be a world first that could have profound implications for vaccine development going forward.
RNA and DNA vaccines are so far experimental, but trials have been promising and many scientists believe it could be one of those two types that will be the model that goes into mass production to protect against COVID-19.
The attraction, say experts, is that they will potentially offer a step towards something that has been the holy grail of vaccine design – the universal vaccine.
Jeffrey Almond, a visiting professor of microbiology at William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, told Sky News: "All the current vaccines we have: diptheria, whooping cough, polio, measles, papillomavirus, you name it; all of them are very different. You don't have a generic process to make them. You have a dedicated factory, a dedicated process, very different technologies.
"What RNA and DNA offer is an escape from that. We can make the RNA by a single process in a single factory. All we have to do is change the sequence of the RNA or DNA."
RNA vaccines work by using a replicated part of the virus's RNA - a set of its biological instructions, similar to DNA – which is then injected into a person, where it enters a cell and makes the cell produce proteins, which have some of the qualities of proteins that would be produced if the virus had entered it.
The proteins, which do not attack the body like those produced by the full virus, are tackled by the body's immune system and the fight is remembered for the future.
DNA vaccines work by injecting a type of a virus's DNA called a plasmid into the body, which is then absorbed by the type of cell that makes proteins.
In a similar way to the RNA vaccine, the body's defences recognise the proteins as foreign and attack them. Because the body is familiar with fighting the protein, if the real virus enters later, the proteins it produces will be attacked.
Professor Almond says RNA vaccines have produced promising results in flu and the hope is that it can be translated to coronavirus.
He told Sky News: "There's a new excitement around RNA, which over the last five years or so has got moving quite impressively, in companies like Moderna and Curevac… and so far, so good.
"You're not yet there, but you are fairly well on the way – you've got some safety data, also immune response data. Do you make antibodies? The answer is yes.
"They are biologically validated, but they are not yet product development level validated. We haven't shown that it works in multiple ways. There's no guarantee that just because it works on flu, it is therefore going to work for corona."
Another type of fairly new vaccine, called a viral vector, is also promising. It works by combining the structure of a virus - one that does not cause a patient serious harm - with a portion of the DNA of the virus the vaccine is meant to protect against.
The body creates antibodies against both the harmless virus and against the DNA, so that when the real virus enters the body later, it is able to defend itself. This has been done successfully to tackle Ebola.
Traditional vaccines that have been around since the time of Jenner, are live. Others are attenuated vaccines, where the live virus is disabled, but the body still produces an immune response.
Most of the vaccines under development for coronavirus, though, are of an already established type called protein sub-unit.
This works by using a protein that makes up only part of the virus – the sub-unit. This can be a protein that makes up part of the virus's surface. The body defends itself against the harmless protein and remembers it if the real virus enters the body in the future. Working examples are hepatitis B and human papillomavirus (HPV).
Things are moving on apace.
When CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was looking at which research into vaccine candidates to fund in early March, it had around 48 options.
WHO said last week it was aware of 70 candidates at the clinical or pre-clinical evaluation stage.
The need for a vaccine is becoming ever more acute after experts said that, because of the threat of second or even third waves, it is looking increasingly likely lockdowns might only be fully relaxed when vaccines are rolled out across populations.
Monitoring
With things moving so rapidly, there is a need to keep on top of the progress being made.
To monitor the development of vaccines, a group from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) have set up a vaccine tracker.
Beate Kampmann, director of LSHTM's Vaccine Centre, said: "It's a tool for people to keep abreast of the developments and to give some information around the different technology platforms feeding into the developments.
"We are updating this literally on a weekly basis at the moment because things are moving quite fast. And now that people have seen us, people have started sending us information about candidates that are about to come through.
"It's getting a thousand hits a day at the moment."
She said interest in the field has grown because the latest developments are being led by university-based scientists as much as by drug companies.
"It's really the academics who've got the ball rolling because they had technology that they could turn around very, very quickly, as opposed to industry.
"Vaccine development in industry is quite different. Unless there is a long-term product development plan and it's profitable, they wouldn't necessarily invest. It's a completely new scenario."
Therapeutics
While dozens of vaccines are being worked on, hundreds of researchers are also looking at drugs that can treat the symptoms of COVID-19, or stop them developing into a more serious infection.
Some of the hundreds of millions of pounds the UK government has put in have gone into trials on a series of drugs that have been identified by the World Health Organisation as being the most promising.
Many of these are already in use to treat other conditions, so have established safety records.
One of these that has been mentioned many times by Donald Trump is hydroxychloroquine, which has traditionally been used to tackle malaria but can also be used for autoimmune conditions like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
But, while hydroxychloroquine and its sister drug chloroquine have got all the attention because of references by the US president and other prolific tweeters like Elon Musk, the WHO is monitoring dozens of studies on whether other already existing drugs can be repurposed for COVID-19.
Among them are:
- Remdesivir: an antiviral medicine that attacks the virus by damaging its RNA, which has proved effective against Ebola and Marburg viruses
- Lopinavir/ritonavir: an AIDS treatment that works by blocking the action of the virus and stops or slows it replicating
- Favipiravir: An antiviral used to treat flu in Japan that works by inhibiting a chemical that allows replication to take place
- Monoclonal antibodies, such as tocilizumab: Artificially created antibodies that target the virus in a similar way to a person's own defences
So far, favipiravir has elicited positive results, hydroxychloroquine trials have been positive and inconclusive, whereas remdesivir worked for one person in a sample size of one.
Even if remdesivir proves effective, Prof Almond says its use will be limited as it is expensive and it has to be administered intravenously, so may end up only being used as a drug of last resort.
The British Medical Journal says none of them have yet to be licensed to treat COVID-19 but says some can be used for compassionate use and stresses that some can increase the risk of death when other factors are at play.
Dozens more trials on other potential COVID-19 therapies, including several in the UK, are ongoing and hundreds of other researchers are working on other aspects of the virus that might help in the battle to defeat it.
The National Institutes of Health in the US says pioneering work is showing how antibodies found in the bloodstream of people who have recovered from SARS could prove highly significant.
The race to develop medicines that can tackle coronavirus is intense – not because scientists want to beat each other, but because every minute lost means lives are also lost.
Methodology
In the scramble to power forward the fight against this contagion, scientists are working in ways they may never have imagined.
Many papers outlining findings are being pushed through without the extensive peer review system that normally stalls their publication.
This comes with caveats, of course, and they are still subject to the rigours of examination from internal review bodies, but it means that research can be distributed to experts the world over within days, when previously it would have taken months.
They are then disseminating that research using a type of communication that has been much maligned due to its tendency to spread misinformation – social media.
The speed at which the digital sphere is helping scientists around the world share ideas and fire imagination is further powering on medical progress.
Prof Lang added: "Social media is obviously a factor but there's such good networks and collaborative groups set up that it doesn't really matter whether they use Twitter or email or WhatsApp, the important scientific findings are getting passed around pretty quickly. So, it's… the general melee of being able to work digitally (that) is making it work."
There have been concerns that with many papers being published before they are peer reviewed, it could lead to some with erroneous findings getting through.
There are deeply scarred memories of the impact of the discredited paper by Andrew Wakefield, wrongly linking the MMR vaccine with autism – a paper that was in fact peer reviewed.
But Prof Lang said there are still enough checks and balances being employed to ensure bad science does not get through.
"Nobody's doing anything to a lesser standard. It's just that everything and the kitchen sink is being thrown at these things.
"It's definitely not a lower standard of research. It's just that processes are happening in a really expedited way, and that's true for vaccines and drugs.
"Things have been pushed to the top of lists. Committees are meeting faster. They're not making any less good decisions.
"Drugs aren't being licensed on the back of (the unreviewed papers or research), but those expedited and scientific studies are really helpful for us getting a kind of broad picture and sort of piecing it all together, and… for guiding wherever things are going at the moment."
The experts are hopeful, partly because the pandemic still has some distance to run, there will be enough time to make sure genuinely useful medicines will be developed.
Prof Lang added: "I'm confident that we'll have trials that will run and have an answer because we've got a narrow window to do these experiments within.
"It's awful that we're in this pandemic, but at least it'll give us time to answer those questions."
The future
As well as hopefully being able to provide medicines to treat and prevent COVID-19, the experts say the speed at which scientists are working right now may provide a buffer against potentially even greater problems in the future.
Prof Lang said: "This isn't disease X. That's the sort of hypothetical situation that these things have to work towards. Disease X has a mortality of 20% or 30%. Imagine where we'd be now.
"Without question this will carry on our learning and that will be the positive that comes out of this… to be better set up.
"Because there will be another one and this is what we have to be prepared for."
Some 650 groups are carrying out around 460 trials to see if the compound they are studying has any value in the fight to keep people safe from the virus ravaging the world.
Studies that were on a back-burner have been brought forward and others have been started from nowhere as the need to urgently examine if specific drugs or theoretical applications have any effectiveness.
It is leading to an acceleration in medical science that could have a lasting legacy long after COVID-19 has become a distant, if horrific, memory.
Normally, clinical trials of new drugs - or even repurposed drugs - can take years.
And the development of new vaccines, it is often said, takes an average of 10 years.
But some experts have said that we could have a vaccine for coronavirus by September, as billions of dollars are poured into the race by governments and drug firms around the world.
And other drugs which treat the devastating effects of the virus on the body are being fast-tracked at an unprecedented rate.
It comes at a time when scientists are collaborating and communicating in ever more innovative ways – driven to do so by the looming threat of a pandemic that could kill millions.
Experts say it has only happened because the scientific community has been able to learn the lessons from earlier attempts to get on top of previous health crises like Ebola and Zika, which scared the world into action.
Tens of thousands are now dying every week.
Trudie Lang, professor of global health research at the University of Oxford, said: "We did learn a massive amount in Ebola and Zika outbreaks about how to do research quickly.
"It usually takes 18 months to set up a clinical trial.
"In Ebola, we did the first trials in outbreaks and we got those running in 16 weeks.
"Here [with coronavirus] they've been set up within weeks, like two or three weeks. That's amazing."
Vaccines
Two of the five types of vaccine which are being worked on have never been licensed for use in humans before.
If one of those is the type that ends up protecting the human race from the virus in future, it will be a world first that could have profound implications for vaccine development going forward.
RNA and DNA vaccines are so far experimental, but trials have been promising and many scientists believe it could be one of those two types that will be the model that goes into mass production to protect against COVID-19.
The attraction, say experts, is that they will potentially offer a step towards something that has been the holy grail of vaccine design – the universal vaccine.
Jeffrey Almond, a visiting professor of microbiology at William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, told Sky News: "All the current vaccines we have: diptheria, whooping cough, polio, measles, papillomavirus, you name it; all of them are very different. You don't have a generic process to make them. You have a dedicated factory, a dedicated process, very different technologies.
"What RNA and DNA offer is an escape from that. We can make the RNA by a single process in a single factory. All we have to do is change the sequence of the RNA or DNA."
RNA vaccines work by using a replicated part of the virus's RNA - a set of its biological instructions, similar to DNA – which is then injected into a person, where it enters a cell and makes the cell produce proteins, which have some of the qualities of proteins that would be produced if the virus had entered it.
The proteins, which do not attack the body like those produced by the full virus, are tackled by the body's immune system and the fight is remembered for the future.
DNA vaccines work by injecting a type of a virus's DNA called a plasmid into the body, which is then absorbed by the type of cell that makes proteins.
In a similar way to the RNA vaccine, the body's defences recognise the proteins as foreign and attack them. Because the body is familiar with fighting the protein, if the real virus enters later, the proteins it produces will be attacked.
Professor Almond says RNA vaccines have produced promising results in flu and the hope is that it can be translated to coronavirus.
He told Sky News: "There's a new excitement around RNA, which over the last five years or so has got moving quite impressively, in companies like Moderna and Curevac… and so far, so good.
"You're not yet there, but you are fairly well on the way – you've got some safety data, also immune response data. Do you make antibodies? The answer is yes.
"They are biologically validated, but they are not yet product development level validated. We haven't shown that it works in multiple ways. There's no guarantee that just because it works on flu, it is therefore going to work for corona."
Another type of fairly new vaccine, called a viral vector, is also promising. It works by combining the structure of a virus - one that does not cause a patient serious harm - with a portion of the DNA of the virus the vaccine is meant to protect against.
The body creates antibodies against both the harmless virus and against the DNA, so that when the real virus enters the body later, it is able to defend itself. This has been done successfully to tackle Ebola.
Traditional vaccines that have been around since the time of Jenner, are live. Others are attenuated vaccines, where the live virus is disabled, but the body still produces an immune response.
Most of the vaccines under development for coronavirus, though, are of an already established type called protein sub-unit.
This works by using a protein that makes up only part of the virus – the sub-unit. This can be a protein that makes up part of the virus's surface. The body defends itself against the harmless protein and remembers it if the real virus enters the body in the future. Working examples are hepatitis B and human papillomavirus (HPV).
Things are moving on apace.
When CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was looking at which research into vaccine candidates to fund in early March, it had around 48 options.
WHO said last week it was aware of 70 candidates at the clinical or pre-clinical evaluation stage.
The need for a vaccine is becoming ever more acute after experts said that, because of the threat of second or even third waves, it is looking increasingly likely lockdowns might only be fully relaxed when vaccines are rolled out across populations.
Monitoring
With things moving so rapidly, there is a need to keep on top of the progress being made.
To monitor the development of vaccines, a group from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) have set up a vaccine tracker.
Beate Kampmann, director of LSHTM's Vaccine Centre, said: "It's a tool for people to keep abreast of the developments and to give some information around the different technology platforms feeding into the developments.
"We are updating this literally on a weekly basis at the moment because things are moving quite fast. And now that people have seen us, people have started sending us information about candidates that are about to come through.
"It's getting a thousand hits a day at the moment."
She said interest in the field has grown because the latest developments are being led by university-based scientists as much as by drug companies.
"It's really the academics who've got the ball rolling because they had technology that they could turn around very, very quickly, as opposed to industry.
"Vaccine development in industry is quite different. Unless there is a long-term product development plan and it's profitable, they wouldn't necessarily invest. It's a completely new scenario."
Therapeutics
While dozens of vaccines are being worked on, hundreds of researchers are also looking at drugs that can treat the symptoms of COVID-19, or stop them developing into a more serious infection.
Some of the hundreds of millions of pounds the UK government has put in have gone into trials on a series of drugs that have been identified by the World Health Organisation as being the most promising.
Many of these are already in use to treat other conditions, so have established safety records.
One of these that has been mentioned many times by Donald Trump is hydroxychloroquine, which has traditionally been used to tackle malaria but can also be used for autoimmune conditions like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
But, while hydroxychloroquine and its sister drug chloroquine have got all the attention because of references by the US president and other prolific tweeters like Elon Musk, the WHO is monitoring dozens of studies on whether other already existing drugs can be repurposed for COVID-19.
Among them are:
- Remdesivir: an antiviral medicine that attacks the virus by damaging its RNA, which has proved effective against Ebola and Marburg viruses
- Lopinavir/ritonavir: an AIDS treatment that works by blocking the action of the virus and stops or slows it replicating
- Favipiravir: An antiviral used to treat flu in Japan that works by inhibiting a chemical that allows replication to take place
- Monoclonal antibodies, such as tocilizumab: Artificially created antibodies that target the virus in a similar way to a person's own defences
So far, favipiravir has elicited positive results, hydroxychloroquine trials have been positive and inconclusive, whereas remdesivir worked for one person in a sample size of one.
Even if remdesivir proves effective, Prof Almond says its use will be limited as it is expensive and it has to be administered intravenously, so may end up only being used as a drug of last resort.
The British Medical Journal says none of them have yet to be licensed to treat COVID-19 but says some can be used for compassionate use and stresses that some can increase the risk of death when other factors are at play.
Dozens more trials on other potential COVID-19 therapies, including several in the UK, are ongoing and hundreds of other researchers are working on other aspects of the virus that might help in the battle to defeat it.
The National Institutes of Health in the US says pioneering work is showing how antibodies found in the bloodstream of people who have recovered from SARS could prove highly significant.
The race to develop medicines that can tackle coronavirus is intense – not because scientists want to beat each other, but because every minute lost means lives are also lost.
Methodology
In the scramble to power forward the fight against this contagion, scientists are working in ways they may never have imagined.
Many papers outlining findings are being pushed through without the extensive peer review system that normally stalls their publication.
This comes with caveats, of course, and they are still subject to the rigours of examination from internal review bodies, but it means that research can be distributed to experts the world over within days, when previously it would have taken months.
They are then disseminating that research using a type of communication that has been much maligned due to its tendency to spread misinformation – social media.
The speed at which the digital sphere is helping scientists around the world share ideas and fire imagination is further powering on medical progress.
Prof Lang added: "Social media is obviously a factor but there's such good networks and collaborative groups set up that it doesn't really matter whether they use Twitter or email or WhatsApp, the important scientific findings are getting passed around pretty quickly. So, it's… the general melee of being able to work digitally (that) is making it work."
There have been concerns that with many papers being published before they are peer reviewed, it could lead to some with erroneous findings getting through.
There are deeply scarred memories of the impact of the discredited paper by Andrew Wakefield, wrongly linking the MMR vaccine with autism – a paper that was in fact peer reviewed.
But Prof Lang said there are still enough checks and balances being employed to ensure bad science does not get through.
"Nobody's doing anything to a lesser standard. It's just that everything and the kitchen sink is being thrown at these things.
"It's definitely not a lower standard of research. It's just that processes are happening in a really expedited way, and that's true for vaccines and drugs.
"Things have been pushed to the top of lists. Committees are meeting faster. They're not making any less good decisions.
"Drugs aren't being licensed on the back of (the unreviewed papers or research), but those expedited and scientific studies are really helpful for us getting a kind of broad picture and sort of piecing it all together, and… for guiding wherever things are going at the moment."
The experts are hopeful, partly because the pandemic still has some distance to run, there will be enough time to make sure genuinely useful medicines will be developed.
Prof Lang added: "I'm confident that we'll have trials that will run and have an answer because we've got a narrow window to do these experiments within.
"It's awful that we're in this pandemic, but at least it'll give us time to answer those questions."
The future
As well as hopefully being able to provide medicines to treat and prevent COVID-19, the experts say the speed at which scientists are working right now may provide a buffer against potentially even greater problems in the future.
Prof Lang said: "This isn't disease X. That's the sort of hypothetical situation that these things have to work towards. Disease X has a mortality of 20% or 30%. Imagine where we'd be now.
"Without question this will carry on our learning and that will be the positive that comes out of this… to be better set up.
"Because there will be another one and this is what we have to be prepared for."
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Never mind Develop it how long will take to vaccinate 60 million people 
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