Erittäin hyvä juttu Oxfordin yliopiston ja ruotsalaisen AstraZenecan rokotteesta, päätutkija Sarah Gilbertistä,
rokotteen kehityksestä ja ihmisen immuniteetista tautia vastaan.
Kannattaa lukea, niin saa hyvän käsityksen rokotetutkimuksesta ja miksi Oxfordilla oli etumatkaa (Mers rokotetta oli tutkittu jo useita vuosia pohjalle)
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“The MERS study was absolutely critical,” says Tom Evans, chief scientific officer of Vaccitech
The work gave Gilbert a running start when Covid-19 emerged. “The spike protein of MERS shares a 40% to 50% similarity to the spike of SARS-CoV-2,” says Naif Alharbi, a Saudi scientist
At the end of April, crunching a process that normally takes about five years into less than four months, Gilbert and her colleagues at Oxford’s Jenner Institute started a human trial on 1,100 people.
Gilbert’s team has leapfrogged other vaccine contenders to the point where it will likely finish vaccinating subjects in its big 10,000-person efficacy trial before other candidates even start testing on that scale
The vaccine is a so-called viral vector type based on years of research by Gilbert and Adrian Hill, the head of the Jenner Institute.
Gilbert has voiced remarkable confidence in her chances, saying the Oxford vaccine has an 80% probability of being effective in stopping people who are exposed to the novel coronavirus from developing Covid-19. She has said she could know by September.
Producing millions, if not billions, of doses of the vaccine may be the biggest challenge in the history of the pharmaceutical industry.
AstraZeneca has agreed to sell the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis during the crisis if it proves effective and has lined up deals with multiple manufacturers to produce more than 2 billion doses.
“It doesn’t need to cure you. … We want a vaccine to stop people from going to hospital and dying. If you can do that, I think people will be pretty happy”