Scientists in Hong Kong develop Coronavirus vaccine but it could be A YEAR before it’s available
SCIENTISTS in Hong Kong believe they have developed a vaccine for the coronavirus but it could be at least a year before it is available for use.
Announcing his team’s success, Yuen Kwok-yung, from the University of Hong Kong, told it would take months to test the vaccine on animals, then on humans.
The news comes as the global research community steps up its efforts to halt the fatal epidemic, with scientists responding to the outbreak at unprecedented speed.
Teams around the world are working on their own coronavirus vaccines, a process that typically takes at least a decade.
Researchers in Australia revealed they had successfully synthesised the virus in the laboratory, using a sample from an infected patient.
Mike Catton, from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, said that they would share their lab-grown virus with colleagues around the world, helping them to test theories and verify their approaches to combat it.
Their success in fabricating the virus is a crucial step in allowing laboratories to create their own treatments and to uncover its secrets.
The virus – in the same family as the virus responsible for the SARS pandemic that killed nearly 800 people in 2003 - originated in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.
While some experts believe coronavirus is not as deadly as SARS, there are fears over it spreading quickly and key features are still unknown, including how lethal it really is.
Scientists have been able to work so much faster with this coronovirus compared with SARS because of progress in genetic technology and scientific openness, where more experts share their material.
What we know about coronavirus so far...
- Death toll hits 169 while cases soar beyond 6,000 - surpassing SARS infections in China
- Foreign Office warned against "all but essential travel" to the country because of the virus outbreak
- British Airways suspended all flights to and from mainland China where up to 200 Brits are stranded
- Brits due to be evacuated from Wuhan will be quarantined for up to 14 days - possibly at a military base
- As of this afternoon, 130 people in UK have been tested for coronavirus - all were negative
- Health Secretary Matt Hancock to chair Cobra meeting at 4.30pm today
- WHO to meet tomorrow to decide whether it will declare outbreak global emergency
- First human-to-human transmissions in people who haven't been to China reported in Germany, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam
The sequencing and publication by Chinese scientists of the viral genome in only a few days, compared to the five months it took during the 2002 SARS outbreak, is considered to be a game changer.
It has allowed research to begin almost immediately, and also revealed that the virus’s similarities to SARS may allow existing research to be repurposed.
Officials have revealed the number of recorded cases of the coronavirus is more than 6,000 which has now surpassed that from the SARS epidemic in 2002.
It is a figure that many researchers believe masks a far higher number of people who have been infected but not yet been to hospital.
There are also suspicions that many more people have been infected but that their symptoms are not yet showing because of an incubation period.
The majority of cases are in China, where an additional 20,000 people are being observed for possible coronavirus infection.
It has so far been spread to 18 other countries and regions.
The intensifying outbreak has led authorities to quarantine at least 56 million people in Hubei Province, including its capital city Wuhan, and halted all means of transport going in and out of many of its cities.
The Department of Health confirmed that 130 people have been tested for coronavirus in Britain - all have come back negative.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation said its emergency committee will meet to discuss whether it will declare the outbreak a global emergency.
Where did coronavirus start? From bats to snakes - the theories on deadly virus' origins
The killer coronavirus was spread from bats to snakes to humans, experts have claimed.
An outbreak of the virus is understood to have started at an open air fish market in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which has since been put in lockdown after 25 people died and more than 600 people were infected globally.
A new study published in the China Science Bulletin this week claimed that the new coronavirus shared a strain of virus found in bats.
Previous deadly outbreaks of SARS and Ebola were also believed to have originated in the flying mammal.
Experts had thought the new virus wasn't capable of causing an epidemic as serious as those outbreaks because its genes were different.
But this latest research appeared to prove otherwise - as scientists scrabble to produce a vaccine.
In a statement, the researchers said: “The Wuhan coronavirus’ natural host could be bats … but between bats and humans there may be an unknown intermediate."
Meanwhile, scientists at Peking University also claim that the deadly virus was passed to humans from bats - but say it was through a mutation in snakes.
The researchers said that the new strain is made up of a combination of one that affects bats and another unknown coronavirus.
They believe that combined genetic material from both bats and this unknown strain picked up a protein that allows viruses bind to certain host cells - including those of humans.
After analysing the genes of the strains the team found that snakes were susceptible to the most similar version of the coronavirus.
It meant that they likely provided a "reservoir" for the viral strain to grow stronger and replicate.
Snakes are sold at the Huanan Seafood Market in central Wuhan and may have jumped to other animals before passing to humans, they claim.
But a senior researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who asked not to be named, said the findings should be treated with caution.
He told the : “It is based on calculation by a computer model.
“Whether it will match what happens in real life is inconclusive.
“The binding protein is important, but it is just one of the many things under investigation. There may be other proteins involved.”
The expert believes that the new strain was an RNA virus, meaning that its mutation speed was 100 times faster than that of a DNA virus such as smallpox.
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