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One year ago today, Chinese scientists posted the first 6 sequences for a novel coronavirus (nCOV), now SARS-CoV-2 the cause of COVID-19
Dr. George Gao is head of China CDC and a very accomplished virologist. I was communicating with him about the Wuhan outbreak and asked morning of 1/10 when sequences would be online. We need global coordination of surveillance for novel viruses and better lines of communication.
One of the main questions being asked and a reason for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is “how was this done so fast?”. It started on Saturday 1/11/20. Waking up to see the nCoV sequences deposited allowed us to design protein constructs for a variety of purposes.
Spike ectodomain with 2 proline substitutions, no cleavage site, foldon trimerization domain and epitope tags for purification for structure and ELISA; similar protein with AVI tag for mAb discovery probe; protein without tags for candidate protein vaccine.
Additional designs for gene constructs using cleavable full length spike with 2P as the basis for making pseudovirus to measure NT activity, and for the gene-based vaccine approaches including mRNA. All these activities started on day one. All needed for vaccine development.
After the sequences were ordered to make proteins for structures, assays, and candidate vaccines we planned staged immunogenicity studies in small animals as we had done for MERS-CoV. 100 mice from 3 different strains were ordered to start and we waited.
We had been trying to go faster at the VRC since the beginning. In 2000 there were 14,000 new HIV infections every day. We all went there to try making a vaccine and it felt like every day mattered. We had a mantra “phase 3 in 2003” which obviously didn’t happen.
