Baylor, Texas Children’s Hospital speed up COVID-19 vaccine development by building on SARS effort

The National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital are developing a vaccine for the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic by building on work that was already underway on another type of coronavirus, the research hospital announced April 9.

Co-led by Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Dr. Peter Hotez, the research team is drawing from experience gained between 2011 and 2016 in developing the SARS vaccine, which has provided the team with time-saving, parallel and rapid-switch strategies as well as critical scientific information that may help accelerate the development of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine, according to a news release. The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 closely resembles the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

“Spike-like structures on the surface of coronavirus give the appearance of a crown, the word is derived from corona in Latin, and enable the virus to attack cells,” said Bottazzi, professor of pediatrics and of molecular virology and microbiology, and associate dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor. “The SARS and COVID-19 viruses are genetically very similar, and their spike proteins and structures also bear similarities that suggest that the SARS vaccine potentially could be used to prevent COVID-19.”

The COVID-19 vaccine being developed by the research team is based on a fragment of a viral protein called the receptor binding domain, which is part of the spike protein the coronavirus uses to attach and infect human cells.

Laboratory experiments have revealed to researchers that human antibodies from people who recovered from SARS can bind to and neutralize both SARS and COVID-19 viruses, though it is not known yet whether SARS antibodies would give protection against the live COVID-19 virus.

Preclinical testing has been completed for the SARS vaccine and it may be ready for Phase I of human clinical trials by this fall, according to the release. The researchers are developing the COVID-19 vaccine in parallel, applying techniques from the SARS process, possibly reducing the development timeline from as long as five years down to 12 or 18 months.

“If all goes well, we estimate that we may have a COVID-19 vaccine candidate ready for Phase I human clinical trials in a year from now, which is when we predict the safety trial for the SARS vaccine still will be running,” Bottazzi said. “We intend to design a strategy so we can rapidly switch and initiate evaluation of the COVID-19 vaccine and eventually fold it into the SARS clinical development plan, instead of designing totally separate strategies just for COVID-19, which would take longer to be advanced. We would have a cohort in which we test the SARS vaccine and a different cohort for COVID-19 vaccine, running in parallel. It may take a year to have the safety data from the COVID-19 phase I clinical trial.”