Breakthrough made in vaccine efforts

A British scientist leading research into a novel coronavirus vaccine claims to have made a breakthrough by rapidly reducing the development time.

Robin Shattock, head of mucosal infection and immunity at Imperial College London, said he has managed to cut the time to get to clinic from "two to three years to just 14 days".

He said his team is ready to start testing the vaccine on animals as early as the coming week with human studies in the summer if enough funding is secured.

He told Sky News: "Conventional approaches usually take at least two to three years before you even get to the clinic. And we've gone from that sequence to generating a candidate in the laboratory in 14 days."

Shattock is part of a global effort to develop a vaccine that could potentially save lives if the novel coronavirus outbreak becomes more rampant.

Scientists from China, the United States, Australia and Europe are collaborating in an effort to speed up the process. He said the vaccine would be too late for this current outbreak but it will be crucial if there is another one.

He added: "It's not going to be too late if this becomes a pandemic and if it circulates around the world. We still don't know much about the epidemic itself, so it may wane over the summer months if it is like influenza.

"We may see a second wave come through on a global basis and if it comes, a vaccine will be really important and would be in place to tackle that."

A group of Chinese and US researchers are working together to develop a vaccine against the virus. The researchers include experts from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, the University of Texas, and Shanghai's Fudan University.

Song Zhiheng, deputy director of Zhejiang province's Science and Technology Department, said scientists have isolated 10 viral strains that can be used to create vaccines.

Li Lanjuan, a renowned Chinese epidemiologist, announced on Jan 28 that her team had successfully isolated three new coronavirus strains, which means they have got the seed strain of the vaccine.

"The seed strain could be cultivated into vaccine strain, with which we could then prepare vaccines," she said.

But Li said it would take at least three months before the vaccine comes out. It will take about one and a half months to cultivate the vaccine strain, and then about half a month for the examination and testing of it. Afterward, it will have to pass the appraisal and verification processes from the health authorities in China, she said.

In the past week, the British government and European agencies announced emergency plans and funds to produce a vaccine to combat the virus and for research into better clinical management of patients.