The Next COVID Challenge: Building an Arsenal of Vaccines
For months, international partners have pressured the United States about intellectual property (IP) concerns and access to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. As the country emerges from the worst of the pandemic, President Joe Biden now has an opportunity to shift his administration’s focus to realizing its longstanding promise of making the United States “the arsenal of vaccines for the world” (1). However, the country cannot accomplish that goal just by exporting mRNA vaccines and waiving IP protections. The current generation of vaccines simply cannot be produced, transported, and administered at the scale needed to tackle the COVID pandemic…
Fortunately, several such vaccines are already under development. Among them is a candidate produced by my company, Akston Biosciences. Our candidate is a “traditional” protein-subunit vaccine based on longstanding technologies that predate the mRNA modality. The vaccine is undergoing phase 1/2 clinical trials in Europe. Many approved vaccines — including those used to inoculate patients against human papilloma virus (HPV), hepatitis B, and shingles — use protein-subunit technology.