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All eyes on a hurdle race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

Leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates have progressed through laboratory tests at record speed. Two early clinical trials suggest that immunization delivers a favourable immune response and safety profile, but questions remain.
By
  1. Christian Gaebler

    1. Christian Gaebler is at the Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10065, USA.

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Michel C. Nussenzweig

    1. Michel C. Nussenzweig is at the Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10065, USA.

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

The catastrophic global health and socioeconomic impact of COVID-19, together with the absence of any clearly effective preventive or therapeutic remedies, has created a massive unmet medical need. Rapid responses by governments, academia and industry have already resulted in the production ofmore than 180 vaccine candidates1, 42 of which are being tested in humans at the time of writing. The considerable design flexibility of newer types of vaccine technology gave these candidates a head start in the race. Some of the candidates, which are based on nucleic acids (such as messenger RNA), entered human trials2 as early as March. In this issue,Mulliganet al.3 andSahinet al.4 report clinical-trial results for a COVID-19 vaccine called BNT162b1, which contains mRNA that encodes part of a protein found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. This vaccine, made by Pfizer and BioNTech, was tested in adults in a combined phase I and phase II clinical trial.

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Nature586, 501-502 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02926-w

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