Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
Health related issues
COVID-19: The race to find a cure
Context: The novel coronavirus has infected more than 4 lakh people worldwide and has led to the deaths of more than 17,000.
The epicentre of the pandemic has now shifted from China to Western Developed countries
With no specific therapy available at present, there is an increased pressure on world scientific community to fast-forward the development of vaccine
Encouraging Developments
As per WHO reports, nearly 20 vaccine candidates are in advanced stages of development and will be ready for Phase-I safety trials.
In USA: Phase-I safety trials of an experimental vaccine (mRNA-1273) has already been administered to healthy volunteers for its safety and immunogenicity.
In China: Another vaccine jointly developed by China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and CanSino Biologics has reportedly been cleared for early-stage clinical trials on more than 100 healthy volunteers
The Serum Institute of India has also announced its readiness to start safety trials of a drug following animal experiments
Challenges of Vaccine Discovery
Side Effects: The immune response induced by experimental vaccination may lead to any disease enhancements.
Duration of immunity: If the immunity induced due to vaccination is transient, then humans will be susceptible to reinfections. Thus, a longer test period is required
Lengthy Process: It will not be possible to roll-out any efficacious vaccine for at least another year, considering the complexity and the lengthy regulatory process involved in vaccine development
Alternative Way
Scientists and pharmaceutical companies have thus rushed to investigate and use drugs that have already been approved by regulatory authorities.
With the available biological information about the virus protein & its mechanism of infection, the re-purposing of existing drugs to treat COVID-19 patients has already been started in many countries
However, without any appropriate controls, careful dosing and safety concerns, such small experiments can do more harm than good
Controlled randomised trials
It is a study in which people are allocated at random (by chance alone) to receive one of several clinical interventions (in this case the experimental vaccine)
Randomization reduces bias and provides a rigorous tool to examine cause-effect relationships between an intervention and outcome. This speeds up the process to understand the drug’s efficacy without undermining safety standards.
Solidarity Project: It is an initiative by WHO whereby four drugs or drug combinations will be tested randomly in many countries around the world.
It includes the anti-Ebola drug, Remdesivir, Chloroquine, anti-HIV drugs, and the Ritonavir/Lopinavir combination, with or without Interferon-beta.
The European counterpart of the trial, Discovery, will also conduct such trials in countries including France, Spain, Germany and the U.K.
The pharma company Roche has also decided to initiate large, randomised Phase-III trials of its arthritis drug Actemra for its safety and efficacy in adult patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these trials will lead to tangible drug therapies against COVID-19.
