Covid-19 - UK targets up to 12 vaccines from around the world

Covid-19 – The UK government aims to secure stocks of not one vaccine or even two but up to 12 that are being developed around the world, hedging its bets to ensure it has something that works as early as possible to try to end the health, social and economic havoc being wreaked by Covid-19.

As Oxford University published early results of its trials, showing its vaccine is safe and provokes a good immune response, Kate Bingham, the chair of the government’s vaccines taskforce, said the strategy was to have an entire portfolio rather than one star player.

On Monday the government announced it was investing in BioNTech/Pfizer’s vaccine and a second being developed by Valneva, a French company that has a manufacturing site in Scotland. That is a total of 90m doses – almost as many as the 100m secured from Oxford.

“The strategy has been very clear,” Bingham said. “We have no template to show us how to make a vaccine against coronavirus because it has never been done.” So the intention is to “explore the landscape” and select a few out of each of the four “buckets”, as she described them – the different modalities or technologies being used around the world in Covid-19 vaccine development.

“There are the two hairy, scary, sexy ones which are the most advanced,” she said. Those are the vaccines such as Oxford’s delivered by an inactivated adenovirus like the common cold, and the mRNA vaccines that employ a genetic code rather than parts of the virus, being developed by BioNTech, Imperial and Moderna.

“An mRNA vaccine has never been approved by any regulator ever,” Bingham said. Johnson & Johnson has had regulatory approval for an Ebola vaccine that uses an adenovirus vector approach, but only in the last couple of weeks.

“Those are the most advanced clinically, but about which we know least. Then you’ve got the rather boring, much more established vaccine formats, which we know much more about but they are further behind in clinical development. The one company we announced, Valneva, with the Scottish manufacturing site, which grows up live Covid virus and then inactivates it – that is a very proven form of vaccination.

“Polio, the new flu vaccines – basically you just take whole virus and then inactivate. They are good at eliciting an immune response because you get the full virus, as it were.”

The “other boring approach which is well-understood”, she said, was the use of an adjuvant – a protein to boost the immune system – which was what the big pharmaceutical companies GSK and Sanofi were doing, for example.

Bingham said vaccines based on those latter two technologies would not get approval before the middle of next year. “But they are better understood and more proven and, as formats, more likely to work – but slower. So what we’ve done is pick what we think are the best in class of the different vaccine types and secure rights to those.”