Coronavirus crisis inspiring ‘unprecedented’ global research effort

The research response to Covid-19 has been faster and more globalised than during previous epidemics, experts say. Progress has been accelerated by a vast amount of open data being available online, particularly gene sequencing data posted on a website in January by a team led by Fudan University. 

Two months later, the first human clinical trials for a vaccine against Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, have begun in the US.

Karen Grépin, an associate professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), told Times Higher Education that, in her estimation, “there has never been such a rapid global collective effort to fight one disease”.

There were similar efforts in the fights against cancer and HIV/AIDS, but those spanned decades. “It has only been a little more than three months since this virus was identified and already there are a number of vaccine candidates in development for Sars-CoV-2, which is a remarkable system,” she said.

Dozens of projects – mostly collaborations between medical schools, governments and pharmaceutical companies – are developing and testing vaccine candidates. Work is happening at specialised labs from VIDO-InterVac at Canada’s University of Saskatchewan to the department of immunology and microbiology at the University of Copenhagen.

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), based in Oslo, has funded teams at the universities of Queensland and Oxford. UQ have said a vaccine could be ready within a year.  Most recently, CEPI partnered with HKU’s State Key Laboratory for Emerging Infectious Diseases to fast-track work.

Many US schools, such as Johns Hopkins University, have halted other research in order to prioritise funding and research on Covid-19 and have openly shared information with other institutions.

A petition posted by academics in February called for journal publishers to make Covid-19 reports free to the public. It resulted in tens of thousands of papers being “unlocked” by Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Elsevier and others.  

“Publishers faced the choice between protecting the value of their intellectual property and protecting humanity during this incredibly urgent medical crisis,” the academics wrote in response to the dropping of the paywalls.

Professor Grépin said that “given the urgency of the work being done on Covid-19, there is even more urgency to ensure that the data being generated in the outbreak be put into the public domain to facilitate and encourage more research”. 

“The global research community is incredibly mobilised right now to contribute their time and skills to research of this nature, and making this data more available will lead to [much more] knowledge being generated,” she added. 

The first human clinical trials started on 16 March in Seattle, funded by the US National Institutes of Health. 

The same day that the US trial began, China authorised its first clinical trial to be led by Chen Wei, a virologist who heads the Institute of Bioengineering at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences.

joyce.lau@timeshighereducation.com