From vaccines to treatments, the biotech industry is on the frontline of the fight against the coronavirus, drawing on a full arsenal of new technologies and data. The ultimate blow for the virus would be a vaccine. One of the most interesting approaches is probably mRNA, where the body is essentially used as the “bioreactor” to produce the actual vaccine by giving cells the template (the messenger RNA) to build the viral proteins against which an immune response is mounted.
While this is incredibly clever, it is also completely untested. The first hurdle is to create a big enough antibody response, and this will now be studied in a phase one study, which alone will take one year. More traditional vaccines may be developed more quickly, but even then we are looking at an 12 month time horizon at the very least, and very likely longer.
A faster, if smaller scale, solution comes from therapeutics. Several biotechnology companies are working on creating lab-grown antibodies against the virus causing COVID-19, which then could be given to at risk groups prophylactically, or even tried to treat patients ill with the disease. These antibodies are designed to be neutralising – to stick to the surface of the virus like velcro and cover it so that the virus cannot bind to cells anymore and cannot enter the system.
Rather than creating antibodies, we can also harvest them from the blood plasma of people who have recovered from the coronavirus – a practice that has already been tried with some success during the SARS epidemic.
Arsenal of drugs
Concurrently, scientists are developing or adapting a range of drugs to fight the pandemic. In the early stages, the focus is on antivirals, which stop or slow the replication of the virus in the body. One of the most advanced – in terms of development – is Gilead Science Inc’s Remdesivir – an intravenous drug originally intended to combat Ebola, but which is now being trialled in early treatment of the coronavirus, with clinical test results due this month.
Tackling some of the more serious complications that occur during the later stages of the virus infection is another area of research.
If the disease is not caught early, nor effectively fought off, the immune system can go into overdrive and start attacking the body. Suppressing this immune overreaction – by blocking the so-called IL-6 receptor – is the focus of drugs for treatment of the later stages of the disease, such as Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ Kevzara.
All this is not to say the biotech industry is immune to the economic effects of the pandemic. Conducting human clinical trials is much harder due to lockdowns, so many of these have been delayed. The commercialisation of new drugs has also slowed, as traditional face-to-face marketing is no longer possible. Production, meanwhile, is affected by the shuttering of factories and shortages of raw materials – some of the major manufacturing sites for ibuprofen, for example, are located in China’s Hubei province and Italy’s Lombardy region. Furthermore, the strain in financial markets will make it harder to raise new capital, which is particularly pertinent for younger, less established biotech companies.
Like other industries, biotech will have to adapt to the post-pandemic world, reviewing supply changes, the benefits and pitfalls of globalisation and working practices. But for now the focus is on combatting the virus, and the industry's innovation brings some early rays of hope.
