Live Desk: A vaccine for COVID-19 could be ready and available ‘within months’, according to a scientist from Oxford University. Professor Sarah Gilbert and her team at the Jenner Insitute are working ‘rapidly’ on a method to stop this novel coronavirus from spreading.

Known as “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19”, the ‘seed stock’ is currently being produced at the University’s Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility.
From there, it will be transferred to Italian manufacturer Advent who will initially produce 1,000 doses for the first clinical trials of the vaccine.

Professor Gilbert told Britain’s The Times that she was confident the jab being developed by her team will work ‘if everything goes perfectly’.
She said “I think there’s a high chance that it will work based on other things that we have done with this type of vaccine.

“It’s not just a hunch and as every week goes by we have more data to look at. I would go for 80 percent, that’s my personal view.” Human trials are due to begin in the next fortnight.

The UK Government has indicated it would be willing to fund the creation of doses if the results of the trials were promising.

A head start
The World Health Organisation has previously warned that a vaccine could take 18-24 months to be ready. But Professor Gilbert is hoping that her team’s previous work could give them the head start that they need.

for some times, they’ve been working on a vaccine against a related coronavirus - Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

MERS is of the same virus family as COVID-19 - which means what they’ve learned could be invaluable. In a statement on the Jenner Institute website, Professor Gilbert said: ‘Novel pathogens such as nCoV-19 require rapid vaccine development.

‘By using technology that is known to work well for another coronavirus vaccine we are able to reduce the time taken to prepare for clinical trials. Advent are working with us to move as rapidly as possible.’

Dhaka, April 12 (campuslive24.com)//Az