Early Oxford-AstraZeneca Coronavirus Vaccine Data 'Encouraging,' Scientists Say

Speaker 1: 00:00 Promising results out of the UK this week, scientists at the university of Oxford have been working on an experimental coronavirus vaccine and the early trial results show. The vaccine produces an immune response in hundreds of people, months after they got the shot. The research came out in the journal Lancet on Monday KPBS science and technology reporter. Shalina Chatwani spoke about the results with Shane Crotty and infectious disease expert and vaccine scientist out of the LA Institute for immunology. So now that you've had a chance to look through the research, what are your initial thoughts Speaker 2: 00:38 Encouraged? I think, uh, it's hard to make vaccines and there, there are lots of ways, lots of stumbling blocks along the way. Um, but yet looking at the, these vaccine trial results, they, they largely look like what what's expected, what this particular vaccine candidate was, uh, was hopefully going to be able to do in terms of eliciting immune responses. One key immune response of interest is the antibody response, and it is eliciting neutralizing antibodies. The antibodies we care about the most against, uh, SARS too. And those are, it was basically an a hundred percent of people. And there was a reasonable amount, the amount of antibodies that have vaccine elicits, a key thing that people are paying attention to in this one, Speaker 1: 01:22 I was just going to ask, how does this vaccine compare to others that are going through clinical trials? Because I know there are maybe close to a dozen under the world health organization right now that are going through anywhere from stage one to stage three clinical trials. Speaker 2: 01:37 Yeah, that's a great question. And in some sense, it's, it's not answerable basically because, um, immunology is complicated. And so the asset, the tests that get run for each clinical trial are run by different labs in different places, you know, so it's very hard to do, try and do any direct comparisons. My take on these is that there's been a whole bunch of vaccine clinical trial, uh, immune system data, immune response data been been released in the past two weeks and almost all of it's been encouraging, you know? And so to me, it's really good to see multiple different vaccine candidates doing reasonably well, you know, in their, in their either phase one or phase two clinical trials. It's, uh, you know, that the soccer analogy would be shots on goal. You know, you you'd, you'd like to have a bunch of vaccine candidates, cause it's definitely the case that not all of them are gonna work. So you want to have multiple candidates that each look reasonable and a number of these candidates that, that have been in the news today in the past couple of weeks use different technologies. So that's also good as well, you know, that not every vaccine strategy that's moving forward is identical. They are trying somewhat different things. They are eliciting different immune responses as well. Um, Speaker 1: 03:01 Right. So if I'm understanding you correctly, the idea is that our body has all of these different types of weapons against the virus that can be helpful in stopping it. And this particular vaccine appears to be sort of encouraging all of those different weapons to be active in the body. Even months after the shot was administered. Speaker 2: 03:24 This Oxford vaccine, you vaccine candidate used, uh, an ad, no viral vector. And yes, it elicited multiple arms of the immune system. And one of the RNA vaccine candidates from Pfizer, there was a report from their clinical trial today too. And in that one also elicited multiple arms of the immune system. Just to be clear, it's not actually months after immunization. At this point, the strongest data in the Oxford report was, um, people got two immunizations, one at time, zero and one at one month. And then they were looking, uh, one month after the booster. And those were the people who I think looked the best. They are, it is accurate that there were people who also just got the one immunization at time, zero, and then they looked at two months and there were responses and those people, but the people who got the two immunizations definitely look better. Speaker 1: 04:22 You know, as we're talking about this, I wonder, you know, you say it's encouraging, but I wonder if it's too early still to get that excited because we do know that viruses can mutate. And even with these neutralizing antibodies that this particular virus is producing perhaps several months from now, they could be ineffective. So what do you think are the next steps? Speaker 2: 04:45 Lots of scientists are thinking a lot, right? About those questions. Um, anybody who wants to be skeptical about vaccines success at this point, COVID-19 vaccine success, you know, in the next, uh, six months, it has every right to be skeptical because if you just look at the history of vaccines, they're, they're incredibly successful, right? Like the measles vaccine has saved like 14 million lives just in the past 10 years. That's incredible, you know, nobody even notices, but your average vaccine takes maybe 20 years to develop, right? So there, there are hard problems to solve. Usually they're very valuable to have, but they don't tend to be fast, but there have been things about SARS too, and COVID-19 and newer vaccine technologies that do look like it's, it's reasonable. Also, if somebody wants to be optimistic, you know, that the data available so far from the nature of the virus and the nature of the immune system and the way most vaccines work and the clinical trial data so far about those immune responses and the protective immunity scene and monkeys, um, that they'll look, they'll look reasonable so far. I would say the two to me, actually, the biggest concern is the durability of the, of the immune response. Um, so far just for time, these vaccine trials we've really looked at essentially immediately after vaccination, you know, within a month. Um, and you'd really like, of course, protective immunity to last, at least a year, you know, five years, 10 years, that's what most vaccines are capable of doing. Speaker 1: 06:21 Even if the vaccine develops, do you foresee supply chain issues much like we have had in the U S with testing, what do you think a timeline might be for the vaccine to be developed? And then for it to actually be administered to all of the people? Um, not only in this country, but globally, Speaker 2: 06:41 That's really a manufacturing question, which is not my expertise. Um, all I can say to that is several of the vaccine candidates, governments, companies, and philanthropic institutions have been thinking about this issue since at least March of wait a minute, how are you going to scale up the manufacturing and have enough have enough doses? And I, and I know that at least a couple of the vaccine platforms have said that they, they would expect to have be able to have millions of doses by the end of this year, which is really quite soon. And with bigger scale up thereafter, they have already been working on it, right? They're not waiting until they have a successful final clinical trial to try and resolve that Speaker 1: 07:26 Factious disease expert. Shane Crotty speaking with KPBS is Shalina Chad Lonnie.