In response to the global threat posed by the #coronavirus, several hundred international research teams have begun their search for a vaccine - including one in Paris. Our France correspondent David Vives has the details. When people first started worrying about the Coronavirus, French media and officials looked to the biological research center, Institute Pasteur.
Now, one hundred and twenty of its scientists are currently working on a vaccine.
This laboratory was among the first in the world to isolate the virus‘s new strain.
As you can imagine, the teams are very busy. They are on the front-lines to quell the virus, and developing a #vaccine is a race against the clock.
Frederic Tangy is heading the Vaccine Innovation Lab. His team is currently working on an antigene which would provide immunity against the virus.
The main protective antigenes is like the #SARS virus that we already published years before. Virus is so-called Coronavirus because it looks like a crown. It is composed of a protein which name is a spike protein so this is the main antigen to protect. If you make antibodies to this one, it will be more difficult to infect yourself.
Finding a vaccine is a difficult task with many uncertainties.
Very difficult. Because it's new. We have to adapt to new situations. We don't have much cases here because patients are in China.
Tangy is using the virus sequence published by Chinese authorities.
But the virus may also mutate. This would change things for Tangy's team.
Whether a single mutation, small changes may impact the efficacity of the #vaccine... we don't know.
Given the virus's potential impact, the vaccine's development is fast-tracked. But it still requires a lengthy process. After the antigens are synthesized, their efficiency will first be tested on mice, and later on humans.
It will take between 8 months and one year. Shorter is crazy, no one can do shorter.
Some studies have called the virus less dangerous than the common flu, which killed 61,000 from 2017-2018.
But Tangy says it is much more dangerous.
The virus is definitely much more dangerous than the flu. Because the potential to kill is 2'5% among infected persons, the potential for flu is 0,05% so it's fifty times superior. If you got infected by that virus, you have 40 times more risk to die than if you are infected by the flu.
Some studies show that a person may have the virus for up to 24 days before showing symptoms.
It's something very frightening that the incubation period may last more than a month, then you die one month after getting the virus, which is rare.
But there is one positive point.
Tangy says creating a vaccine today is much quicker than it was twenty years ago, during China's SARS epidemic. This is thanks to improved international cooperation.
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