Baylor College of Medicine’s recent agreement with Biological E will soon propel the Houston-based institution’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate to a crucial position in the ongoing vaccine race, feels Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi, associate dean, BCM National School of Tropical Medicine. “Our vaccine center has been working on developing coronavirus vaccines for at least a decade. We started in 2011, working with a SARS vaccine program, and then we also added a MERS vaccine program. So, we already had a pretty long experience … Our niche is to use recombinant protein technologies. The moment we knew the sequence of the Covid-19 virus was published in January … we were able to pull out the piece of the sequence we were going to be using as our target. We didn’t have to wait very long. We have only been working with this virus from, say, the beginning of February and, in a very quick turnaround, we already knew how to, in our labs, clone and engineer the candidate.”

 

The institute had designed the production process and lucked out because SARS is very similar to this Covid-19 virus.

Commenting on the progress being made by the tie-up with Biological E, Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi old Indian Express, “On the side of recombinant protein technologies, even though they may be a little bit behind (in the vaccine race, they’re not too far) behind. For example, Biological E is going to start a phase I trial probably between September and October. We will not enter into phase III until probably April of next year, but here’s where the difference is. Biological E already knows it can produce a billion doses a year of this vaccine. There’s nowhere around the world that a single manufacturer can adopt that viral vector, RNA (or) DNA technology and rapidly scale the production and even formulation.”

 

With the protein-based vaccine approach, the fact (is) that it is the same exact backbone and process as the hepatitis B vaccine. There’s already a network of vaccine manufacturers around the world that know how to make the hepatitis B vaccine. They even have pre-qualifications, meaning they have the infrastructure and the quality. “We gave our recipe to Biological E and, I can tell you, in a cycle of three weeks, they went from a laboratory scale to a billion doses per year scale. And that’s unprecedented too. I think you’re going to see that, even though you may believe we are behind, we are going to catch up so quickly. We already have precedent testing a recombinant protein vaccine, so regulatory bodies already are aware of what to look for.”

Source: The Indian Express

In an interview to The Indian Express, Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi, said that Hyderabad-headquartered vaccine maker Biological E can help scale up production of an affordable Covid-19 vaccine.