Expert sees possibility for coronavirus vaccine within next year

There's a chance that a coronavirus vaccine could be developed and released within next year or so, as the first-stage clinical trial of a recombinant novel coronavirus vaccine developed by domestic medical experts is nearly complete, said Sun Xiaodong, deputy director of the Shanghai Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Thursday night, Sun held a live video broadcast with overseas Chinese in Burkina Faso in West Africa which was co-organized by the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Burkina, Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office and the local health commission.

During the video talk, Wang Hongbo, leader of China's medical team supporting Burkina Faso, asked about the possible development of a coronavirus vaccine. Sun responded that a recombinant adenovirus vector-based vaccine developed by a team led by Chen Wei, a prominent academician and a researcher, has nearly completed its clinical human trial, with two more trials ahead.

"The first clinical trial is mainly for researching the vaccine's safety and applicability to the human body. Then it will enter a second trial with increasing sample volume, which may require the vaccine to be tested on hundreds of people to continue its safety research and find out more about its immunogenicity. And that will take two to three months to get results," explained Sun.

"Following that, there will be a third clinical trial which will last for at least half a year with thousands of people involved. It will study the effect of the vaccine after large-scale human application. It will explore how long the immune effect can last," Sun went on to say.

Sun said some vaccines can take two to three years to be fully developed, but in this case mathematical models could be used to estimate the vaccine's long-term effects.

Sun's predicted timeline for the release of a vaccine is based on the progress to-date from Chen's research team.

Ti Gong