Why do drug development, manufacturing, distribution and vaccination take so long?
Everyone’s sick of lockdown. Over the past few months, you’ve probably asked yourself this question: “Why is it taking so long to get a Covid vaccine?” The answer is more complicated that you might think. In fact, vaccine candidates are being developed much faster than many scientists expected, which means what you should actually be asking is: “How is it that I’ll get a vaccine so soon?” According to a recent review in the journal Nature, there are currently more than 180 vaccine candidates in development. As the review’s author, immunologist Florian Krammer, predicted: “The data available so far suggest that effective and safe vaccines might become available within months, rather than years.” Many reasons why you’re still waiting are down to economics: limited resources need to be allocated. But as explained in another review led by pharmaceutical expert Robert Williams, “formulation science plays a critical role throughout the development, manufacturing, distribution, and vaccination phases.” Formulating pharmaceuticals — creating new drugs — is notoriously expensive and time-consuming. The Covid-19 pandemic has turned formulation into a race. A potential drug will traditionally take over a decade to go from initial design to final production, but it’s taken under a year to produce potential vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. One explanation for the rapid pace of progress is funding. National programs like ‘Operation Warp Speed’ in the US, led by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), have reduced timescales. Under normal circumstances, pharmaceutical firms risk their own cash to develop a drug and reap any rewards. During the current pandemic, however, government programs are investing public money in buying products before they exist, basically betting that the companies will successfully produce a vaccine. Another reason for the rapid drug development is the existing scientific data. Researchers had already studied two close relatives (and structurally similar) coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV, so some vaccine candidates didn’t need to be designed from scratch and were ready to start clinical trials in humans.
