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Working in pharmaceutical comms, I get asked a lot about #covid19 #vaccine development. To counter some of the heavy information and scepticism around it, here's some positive thoughts on exciting recent developments, simplified. A thread:
There's been plenty of talk about the potential of Gilead's existing drug remdesivir to be effective in treating symptoms of #coronavirus. But other treatments are now being specifically developed for this virus, which is exciting for a number of reasons
Companies like Regeneron are studying monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). These are hugely significant, and likely to be available for use imminently. They act as a treatment at all stages of the disease, by neutralising the effect of the virus
This not only helps people recover better and quicker when they have the virus, reducing the pressure on health systems (and cost), but it also opens up the possibility of conducting Human Challenge Trials (HCTs) for vaccine candidates. And these are really important.
Life won't be able to return to complete normality until a vaccine is available and widely distributed, so speeding up this process is essential. HCTs offer this ability, compared to randomised clinical trials (RCTs), which are considered the gold-standard, but far slower
In RCTs, a potential vaccine is given to a participant, who goes about their normal daily life to test the treatment. But only a small % may encounter the disease, so this needs large numbers and a long time for RCTs to reveal differences between groups
But in a HCT, once the participant has received the vaccine being tested, they are actively exposed to live coronavirus. Because this exposure is guaranteed, the effectiveness of the vaccine can be assessed easier, quicker and with less people
So one importance of a good treatment (eg. mAbs) is that we can conduct HCTs in the knowledge that if the trial vaccine isn't effective, we can help treat the participant effectively, reducing any risk to those people. This speeds up time to full vaccine approval and use
Giving people more confidence in the effectiveness of the vaccine will also being imperative when you consider the fact that we need billions of people to trust and take the vaccine, even in a world with a growing and "disturbing anti-science trend" https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/933619
