Super-rapid race for saving lives by developing COVID-19 vaccines

Abstract

The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has affected millions of people and claimed thousands of lives. Starting in China, it is arguably the most precipitous global health calamity of modern times. The entire world has rocked back to fight against the disease and the COVID-19 vaccine is the prime weapon. Even though the conventional vaccine development pipeline usually takes more than a decade, the escalating daily death rates due to COVID-19 infections have resulted in the development of fast-track strategies to bring in the vaccine under a year's time. Governments, companies, and universities have networked to pool resources and have come up with a number of vaccine candidates. Also, international consortia have emerged to address the distribution of successful candidates. Herein, we summarize these unprecedented developments in vaccine science and discuss the types of COVID-19 vaccines, their developmental strategies, and their roles as well as their limitations.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; vaccine development.

Figure 1:

Stages of vaccine development. Vaccines requires largely five major steps, starting with preclinical tests in animal models, phase I involves limited number of human individuals and each of the next steps needs exponible increments of human individuals and it decreases change of success to reach to next levels and only limited numbers of vaccines are approved for public use by regulatory agencies of different countries.

Figure 2:

Phases of vaccine production in the normal (non-pandemic) versus accelerated pandemic COVID-19 threat. (A) Normally, it takes approx. 10 years for the approval of a single vaccine. (B) In the COVID-19 pandemic situation, the time period has been shortened to 18–20 months for the approval.

Figure 3:

Types of COVID-19 vaccines.