The Biden administration is launching a $5 billion-plus program to accelerate development of new coronavirus vaccines and treatments, seeking to better protect against a still-mutating virus, as well as other coronaviruses that might threaten us in the future.
“Project Next Gen” — the long-anticipated follow-up to “Operation Warp Speed,” the Trump-era program that sped coronavirus vaccines to patients in 2020 — would take a similar approach to partnering with private sector companies to expedite development of vaccines and therapies. Scientists, public heath experts and politicians have called for the initiative, warning that existing therapies have steadily lost their effectiveness and new ones are needed .
“It’s been very clear to us that the market on this is moving very slowly,” Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said in an interview Monday. “There’s a lot that government can do, the administration can do, to speed up those tools … for the American people.”
Jha and others said the new effort will focus on three goals: creating long-lasting monoclonal antibodies, after an evolving virus rendered current treatments ineffective; accelerating development of vaccines that produce mucosal immunity, which is thought to reduce transmission and infection risks; and speeding efforts to develop pan-coronavirus vaccines to guard against new SARS-CoV-2 variants, as well as other coronaviruses.
Officials note that several coronavirus-driven outbreaks in the last two decades, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus in 2002, and Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012, have spurred worries about the potential for future health crises related to the viruses. That said, a universal coronavirus vaccine could take years to develop; researchers have sought unsuccessfully for decades to create such a vaccine against influenza.
Some of the lab work is already underway, and the government has begun efforts to find potential private-sector partners, said Dawn O’Connell, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services.
“We’ve begun surveying the landscape out there — assessing what vaccine candidates are available, [and] moving through what exciting technologies are there,” O’Connell said. Her team last week informed companies working on monoclonal antibodies that the government may make new investments in the technology.
Jha declined to set timetables for when the products might come to market, saying that would depend on drugmakers’ production plans, reviews by the Food and Drug Administration and other factors. “The timelines are really going to be predicated on how quickly the scientific advancements continue, and how quickly we can study and measure the efficacy and safety of these products,” he said.
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They moved on to the second part