A Canadian company says that it has produced a COVID-19 vaccine just 20 days after receiving the coronavirus’s genetic sequence, using a unique technology that they soon hope to submit for FDA approval.
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Medicago CEO, Bruce Clark said his company could produce as many as 10 million doses a month. If regulatory hurdles can be cleared, he said in a Thursday interview, the vaccine could start to become available in November 2021.
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An Israeli research lab has also claimed to have created a vaccine. But Clark says his company’s technique, which has already been proven effective in producing vaccines for seasonal flu, is more reliable and easier to scale.
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Medicago does not work with a live virus. Instead, it uses plants, a relatively new approach that has seen much advancement in the past decade. It inserts a genetic sequence into agrobacterium, a soil bacterium, which is taken up by plants in this case, a close cousin to tobacco. The plant begins to produce the protein that can then be used as a vaccine. If the virus begins to mutate, as is expected for COVID-19, they can just update the production using new plants.
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“That is the difference between us” and egg-based methods, he said, “We go directly to producing the vaccine or the antibody without having to propagate the virus.”
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“Using plants and genetically engineered agro bacteria works faster than eggs also make the vaccine much easier to produce at scale”, he concluded.
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Clark says that once they get the green light, they will be able to produce 10 million vaccine doses a month.
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Also, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health, told the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee that human trials for a vaccine (he did not specify the manufacturer) would be possible “within a few weeks.
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”However, he said that a vaccine would not be available to the broader public for another 12 to 18 months.Â
