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| President Moon Jae-in, right, listens to a researcher after attending a meeting of officials from industrial, academic and medical circles to discuss ways to develop medicines and vaccines for COVID-19 at the Institut Pasteur Korea in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, in this April 9 photo. Yonhap |
By Bahk Eun-ji
A number of pharmaceutical companies, scientists and research bodies all over the world are actively joining in the race to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, but experts cautiously predict that many obstacles still stand in the way of their goal.
At the beginning of the month, President Moon Jae-in voiced hopes that the country could take the lead in developing vaccines and medicines for the highly contagious virus, calling for consistent efforts to do so during a joint meeting with related academics and industry and hospital officials. Moon also said 210 billion won ($172 million) will be allocated to support development of a vaccine, and he promised to support the private sector in its vaccine development efforts.
As the country has been mapping out a government-wide support system, pharmaceutical companies have engaged in the call to arms to find treatments and vaccines to combat COVID-19. In Korea, many seek to carry out clinical tests on antibody-based treatments for the virus as a large number of blood samples have already been collected from people infected with the virus. In addition, development of a process for using blood plasma taken from recovered patients is also expected.
SillaJen, one of the nation's largest bio startups, announced on April 26 that it has recently started animal trials for a potential COVID-10 vaccine in Canada. Testing for two candidate vaccines has been underway, and the company said it expects to take around six weeks.
Institut Pasteur Korea, a research center specializing in infectious diseases, has conducted tests on cells for some 2,500 medications in an effort to find potential drugs that could be effective in treating coronavirus patients. In February, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning provided emergency research funds to the institute for the project.
There are hundreds of ongoing clinical trials not only in Korea but also all over the world. However, only a handful of drugs have advanced into the research stage.
Failures of promised treatments
U.S. President Donald Trump once suggested that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, was a potential treatment for the coronavirus, but experts said not only was Trump proven wrong, he was also ignorant about the hazards the drug poses to COVID-19 patients. Several studies have proven that patients risk heart problems and even death when they use hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, and Canadian health authorities have issued a warning against the use of the drug this week.
"Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine can have serious side effects. These drugs should be used only under the supervision of a physician," Canada's public health agency said in a statement on its website.
Many clinical trials were also underway for Kaletra (lopinavir/ritonavir as PEP), an existing drug used for HIV treatment and prevention, as it might work to prevent COVID-19 infection. At the end of last month, France's drug safety agency warned of potentially serious side effects of the drug's use in treating COVID-19, after the deaths of three people possibly linked to self-medication.
The French drug safety agency said the treatment needs "particular attention," because using the two drugs together runs the risk of causing heart arrhythmia and could provoke a heart attack.
Many pinned their hopes to treat the virus with remdesivir, an antiviral medication developed by Gilead Sciences, a biopharmaceutical company in the U.S., but the World Health Organization (WHO) published draft documents warning a clinical trial conducted in China failed to observe improvements in patients' condition or reduce the pathogen's presence in the bloodstream.
Gilead immediately released a statement insisting the WHO posting included inappropriate characterizations of the study, which was terminated early due to low enrollment and, as a result, cannot be used to make statistically meaningful conclusions. Researchers are working to find out what works until there's a proven treatment.
Likewise, no tangible achievements have emerged to give hope yet. The novel coronavirus is a mutant RNA virus, which is a collection of genetic material packed inside a protein shell. Once an RNA virus makes contact with a host, it starts to make new copies of itself that can go on to infect other cells. The flu and measles are RNA viruses, meaning they are more prone to changes and mutations, compared with DNA viruses such as herpes and human papillomavirus (HPV).
Because of its characteristic of mutation, the vaccine development is more challenging, said Song Si-young, a professor of Yonsei University College of Medicine and chairman of the national committee of bio-health industry strategy promotion.
In a recent report published by the Korea Pharmaceutical and Bio-Pharma Manufacturers Association, Song said there are few RNA virus vaccines so far, and no vaccines or treatments for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) either.
"Under such circumstances, we should be careful about having too much expectation for new vaccines for the virus in a short period of time," he said.
He then pointed out that even if the development of vaccines for new acute infectious diseases is successful, it is difficult to make profits if the spread stops, and it is also difficult to develop generic drugs to cope with the mutated virus.
