ISRAELI SCIENTISTS: ‘IN THREE WEEKS, WE WILL HAVE CORONAVIRUS VACCINE’

Article Source: Jerusalem Post

A team of Israeli scientists are on the cusp of developing the first vaccine against coronavirus, according to Israel’s Minister of Science and Technology, Ofir Akunis. If all goes as planned, the vaccine could be ready within three weeks and available in 90 days.“Congratulations to MIGAL on this exciting breakthrough. I am confident that there will be further rapid progress, enabling us to provide a needed response to the grave global COVID-19 threat,” Akunis said.

For the past four years, a team of MIGAL scientists have been developing a vaccine against Infectious Bronchitis Virus, a disease affecting poultry, whose effectiveness has been proven in pre-clinical trials carried out at the Veterinary Institute.MIGAL is located in the Galilee.“Our basic concept was to develop the technology, and not specifically a vaccine for this kind or that kind of virus,” said Dr. Chen Katz, MIGAL’s biotechnology group leader, who explained that “the scientific framework for the vaccine is based on a new protein expression vector, which forms and secretes a chimeric soluble protein that delivers the viral antigen into mucosal tissues by self-activated endocytosis, causing the body to form antibodies against the virus.”

MIGAL laboratory (Photo Credit: Lior Journo)Endocytosis is a cellular process in which substances are brought into a cell by surrounding the material with cell membrane, forming a vesicle containing the ingested material.  Katz said that in pre-clinical trials, the team demonstrated that the oral vaccination induces high levels of specific anti-IBV antibodies.

Latest articles from Jpost

 “Let’s call it pure luck,” he continued. “We decided to choose coronavirus as a model for our system – just as a proof of concept for our technology.”But after scientists sequenced the DNA of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, the MIGAL researchers examined it and found that the poultry coronavirus has high genetic similarity to the human coronavirus and that it uses the same infection mechanism, a fact that increases the likelihood of achieving an effective human vaccine in a very short period of time.“All we need to do is adjust the system to the new sequence,” Katz continued. “We are in the middle of this process and hopefully in a few weeks, we will have the vaccine in our hands. Yes, in a few weeks, if it all works, we would have a vaccine to prevent coronavirus.”Katz cautioned that MIGAL would be responsible for developing the new vaccine, but that the vaccine would then have to go through a regulatory process, including clinical trials and large-scale production. Akunis said that he has instructed the director-general of the Ministry of Science and Technology to fast-track all approval processes with the goal of bringing the human vaccine to market as quickly as possible.“Given the urgent global need for a human coronavirus vaccine, we are doing everything we can to accelerate development,” said David Zigdon, CEO of MIGAL, who said he believes the vaccine could “achieve safety approval in 90 days.”He said that this will be an oral vaccine, making it particularly accessible to the general public. “We are currently in intensive discussions with potential partners that can help accelerate the in-human trials phase and expedite the completion of final product development and regulatory activities,” he concluded.