Lauren Davis
COVID-19, vaccines and pandemic preparedness: lessons learnt With Australia officially in its eighth wave of COVID-19 at the time of writing, the time is ripe to look back at the challenges faced and lessons learnt from vaccine development during the early days of the pandemic. The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity recently covered this very topic in a discussion with three pre-eminent vaccinologists.
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from the idea through to actually having a vaccine in clinical trials in a really short space of time? “I wasn’t successful in getting that project
rofessor Sarah Gilbert was made a
Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2021, in recognition of her work initiating and leading the production and development of the Oxford– AstraZeneca vaccine (trade name Vaxzevria). The
funded, but at least it had meant that we’d done a lot of thinking about what would we need to do to respond fast if there was an outbreak of an unknown virus, and that’s then what happened at the beginning of 2020. “We’d done 12 clinical trials with ChAdOx1
first Vaxzevria vaccine was administered less than
[adenoviral] vector vaccines prior to April 2020
a year after the pandemic was officially declared,
when we started the COVID vaccine trials; so we
on 4 January 2021 — so how did Gilbert’s team
had all the teams in place, we had the expertise, we
at the University of Oxford manage to develop
had the experience of working with the regulatory
it so rapidly?
and ethical authorities, we’d done all of this before
“With outbreak pathogens, we’d been
in terms of at least getting to a phase 1 trial.
following the usual academic funding model
“It was a question of doing what the team
of doing a little bit of work and then publishing
knew how to do but working out the fastest way
results and then trying to get money for the next
we could do it, what had to be done before the
stage,” Gilbert said. “It was very, very slow. So in
next thing could be done, looking many steps
2019 I’d started thinking how would we do all this
ahead, and just getting everything off the ground
if we needed to do it quickly; how would we move
as quickly as possible.”
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