【齐心抗疫】新型冠状病毒疫苗可能会在秋季问世

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Timetable For A Vaccine Against The New Coronavirus? Maybe This Fall
新型冠状病毒疫苗何时问世？大约在秋季

Joe Palca February 12, 202010:00 AM ET

                               
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Paul McKay, a molecular immunologist at the Imperial College School of Medicine in London, checks a dish of bacteria containing genetic material from the new coronavirus. He and his team are testing a candidate vaccine.
图为伦敦帝国理工学院医学院的分子免疫学家保罗·麦凯（Paul McKay）检验一个装有新型冠状病毒遗传物质的培养皿。他和他的团队正在试验一种可能消灭病毒的疫苗。

Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
（图源：Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images）

Right now scientists are trying to accomplish something that was inconceivable a decade ago: create a vaccine against a previously unknown virus rapidly enough to help end an outbreak of that virus. In this case, they're trying to stop the spread of the new coronavirus that has already infected tens of thousands of people, mainly in China, and given rise to a respiratory condition now known as COVID-19.
此刻，科学家们正在尝试完成十年前难以想象的事情：及时迅速地研制出疫苗，以对抗一种前所未闻的病毒，并终止病毒的爆发。现在他们正努力阻止新冠病毒的蔓延，该病毒早已感染了数万人，引起现在名为COVID-19的呼吸道疾病，其中大部分患者集中在中国。
Typically, making a new vaccine takes a decade or longer. But new genetic technologies and new strategies make researchers optimistic that they can shorten that timetable to months, and possibly weeks — and have a tool by the fall that can slow the spread of infection.
一般来说，新疫苗的研发需要十年甚至十年以上，但在新基因技术和新抗疫战略的帮助下，研发人员乐观地判断，可将这段时间缩短到几个月，甚至可能是几周，到秋季便有望研制出新的疫苗，延缓疫情的蔓延。
What's the urgency?
时间有多紧迫？
"Vaccines are really our most successful tool to prevent an infectious disease," says David Weiner, executive vice president and director of the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia.
“疫苗真的是我们预防传染病的最佳武器。”来自费城维斯塔尔（Wistar)研究所疫苗和免疫疗法中心的主任兼执行副总裁大卫·韦纳（David Weiner）说道。
It used to take a long time to make vaccines, because scientists had to isolate and grow the virus in the lab. But now, it's possible to skip that step altogether and build a vaccine based on a virus' genetic sequence.
过去，疫苗的研发耗时较长，因为病毒需要在实验室隔离培养。如今，科学家也许可以完全跳过这一步，直接根据病毒的基因序列进行研发。
Chinese scientists made that genetic sequence from the new coronavirus public in early January, just weeks after the first infections with the virus were reported. That prompted several labs to start work on building a vaccine.
一月初，也就是首批感染病例上报几周之后，中国的科学家们公开了新型冠状病毒的基因序列。随后，几个实验室便据此开始着手疫苗研发的工作。
Vaccines work by teaching an individual's immune system to recognize an invading virus and neutralize it. The vaccine that Weiner and his colleagues are developing is what's called a DNA vaccine.
疫苗的作用原理是教会人体免疫系统识别入侵病毒，使病毒失活。韦纳和他的同事正在研发的疫苗被称为DNA疫苗。
They'll first turn pieces of the new coronavirus' genetic code (which is RNA) into complementary snippets of DNA. These snippets will then be injected into someone's skin, where they will be taken up by skin cells. The skin cells will then turn those DNA sequences into proteins identical to the ones a virus would produce, and those will be what "teaches" the immune system to recognize the new virus.
先将新冠病毒的遗传密码（也就是RNA）转化成DNA的互补片段，注射进皮肤。皮肤细胞接收这些DNA序列，然后将其转化成病毒产生的相同蛋白质，而这些蛋白质会”教“免疫系统如何识别这种新型病毒。
Weiner and his colleagues are in the process of determining which viral sequences produce the best "teachers."
韦纳和他的同事现在做的就是，确定哪些病毒序列能产生最好的“老师”。
This isn't Wistar's first stab at rapid vaccine development. Weiner and his team worked on a vaccine for Ebola after an outbreak of that virus in 2014.
这不是维斯塔尔研究所首次尝试迅速研发疫苗。2014年埃博拉病毒爆发之后，韦纳和他的团队就曾为此进行过疫苗的研发。
Including the initial time needed for animal testing and human safety testing, "We were able to go from no vaccine to a vaccine tested in the clinic in about 18 months — 15 to 18 months," he says. They also made a vaccine against the coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome, after an outbreak in South Korea. "And we were able to design and develop and move into the clinic in 11 months."
算上最初动物试验和人体安全试验所需要的时间，“我们做到了从没有疫苗到临床试验疫苗，只花了大概18个月——15到18个月。”他说。韩国爆发中东呼吸综合症后，他们也对引起该病的冠状病毒进行了疫苗的研发。“这次，我们从构想到研发，再到临床，只花了11个月。”
Weiner says he's hoping to halve that time with the vaccine they are making against the new coronavirus.
韦纳说，他希望能将他们正在研发的新冠病毒疫苗应用于临床的时间再缩短一半。
Keith Chappell at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, thinks he can do even better. He, too, has a vaccine that's based on the virus' genetic sequence. The Queensland team has come up with an approach it calls the molecular clamp. It works by improving the body's immune response to certain viral proteins.
澳大利亚布里斯班昆士兰大学的基思·夏贝尔(Keith Chappell)认为他可以做得更好。他也有一种基于病毒基因序列的疫苗。昆士兰大学的研究小组提出了一种叫做“分子钳（molecular clamp)”的方法，通过提高人体对某些病毒蛋白的免疫反应来发挥作用。
"Our goal was to be able to hit 16 weeks from sequence information to having a product that is shown to be safe and effective [in lab tests] and is ready for administration to the first humans," Chappell says.
“我们的目标是要在十六周内，根据基因序列信息，研发出实验室测试显示安全有效的产品，而且能随时用到到第一批患者身上，”夏贝尔说。
Right now, Chappell and his colleagues are also trying to figure out which genetic sequences will be most effective at helping the immune system recognize the coronavirus.
目前，夏贝尔和他的同事们也在尝试分辨哪段基因序列能最有效地帮助免疫系统识别新型冠状病毒。
"Next steps will be moving into animal models for testing and also working out how to scale up to get to the levels that would be required in humans and beyond," he says.
他表示:“下一步会进行动物测试，并研究出怎么一步步提升剂量，达到人体和其他物种需要的水平。”
Both Chappell's team in Australia and Weiner's team in Philadelphia, in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Inovio, are getting financial support from a fairly new organization called CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. CEPI is a global partnership of public, private and philanthropic organizations; it's also supporting efforts at the biotech companies Moderna and CureVac.
澳大利亚的夏贝尔团队和费城的韦纳团队与制药公司艾棣维欣（Inovio）合作，资金支持均来自于一个名为流行病防范创新联盟(CEPI)的新兴组织。CEPI由全球的政府、民间和慈善组织合作组成，也支持生物技术公司Moderna和CureVac的相关活动。

Ami Patel, a research assistant professor at the Wistar Institute, is working with David Weiner and others on a DNA vaccine against the new coronavirus. The team is in the process of determining which viral sequences produce the best "teachers" to help the human immune system defeat the virus.
Darien Sutton

图为维斯塔尔研究所的研究助理教授艾米·巴特尔(Ami Patel)，她正在与大卫·韦纳等人合作，研究针对新型冠状病毒的DNA疫苗。该团队正在确定哪段病毒序列能产生最好的“老师”来帮助人类免疫系统战胜病毒。（图源Darien Sutton）

Among other vaccine efforts worldwide, the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is working on a vaccine, and GSK has also offered to help new vaccine efforts. Researchers at Imperial College London have developed a vaccine that's already being tested in animals, and vaccine efforts are also reportedly underway in China.
在全球范围内，还有其他疫苗项目也在进行之中，制药巨头强生公司(Johnson & Johnson)正在研制一种疫苗，葛兰素史克公司(GSK)也表示愿意帮助开发新疫苗。伦敦帝国理工学院的研究人员已经研发出一种疫苗，并已经在动物身上进行过试验。据报道，中国也在进行疫苗的研制工作。
CEPI CEO Richard Hatchett says the organization was created when people realized that an Ebola vaccine had been under development for a decade and it still took more than a year to get it to people when the 2014 Ebola outbreak occurred in western Africa.
CEPI首席执行官理查德·哈契特(Richard Hatchett)表示，之所以成立这个组织，是因为在2014年西非爆发埃博拉疫情之前，埃博拉疫苗研制工作就已经进行了十年，而在疫情爆发后，人们又花了一年多的时间才得到这种疫苗。
"There were a number of enlightened global public health leaders who said, 'You know, that shouldn't happen. We should have some kind of an organization to develop vaccines against epidemic diseases,'" he says.
“一些明智的全球公共卫生领导人说，‘你知道，那是不应该发生的。我们应该有一个组织来研发针对流行病的疫苗，’”他说。
Even in the rosiest of scenarios, Hatchett says, once the vaccine is in hand, it still needs to get to the people who need it, and that takes time — at least weeks to months, depending on the urgency.
哈契特说，即使在最乐观的情况下，疫苗一旦研制出来，也要花时间送到需要的人手里，至少数周到数月，视紧迫性而定。
Naturally, public health officials would like to have a vaccine as soon as possible. If the coronavirus outbreak pattern is anything like those of flu outbreaks, it will tend to taper off when the weather gets warmer and pick up as winter approaches and people spend more time indoors.
当然，公共卫生官员都希望可以尽早获得疫苗。如果新型冠状病毒爆发的模式与流感爆发相似的话，那么随着气温回暖，疫情将逐渐缓和，而冬天临近时，人们更多时候待在室内，疫情加重。
"We are making very aggressive efforts in the hopes of having a vaccine available — some form of vaccine available, potentially, as early as this fall," Hatchett says.
哈契特说:“我们正在积极做出努力，可能的话，希望最早在今年秋天就能研制出某种形式的疫苗。”

原文链接：https://www.npr.org/sections/hea ... rus-maybe-this-fall

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