UW Medicine: COVID-19 Vaccine Delivers 'Promising Results'

Charles Woodman
Updated ·4 min read

SEATTLE, WA — UW Medicine says their COVID-19 vaccine has been making great strides and could become a valuable asset for battling the pandemic in the near future.

They're touting a new study, published in Science Translational Medicine, which showed their RNA COVID-19 vaccine had promising results in preclinical animal studies— and that if their vaccine meets a few other requirements, could end up being tested on humans within the year.

"We saw robust immune responses just in a single dose within two weeks after immunization," said Deborah Fuller, Microbiology Professor for the University of Washington School of Medicine. "I hadn't ever seen that before with any other candidate nucleic acid vaccine so that got us very excited, and we realized that we may be on to a rapid response vaccine to COVID-19."

Fuller says there are a few key metrics that will determine the success of any coronavirus vaccine:

  • How many doses does it take? Ideally a vaccine would provide immunity quickly, with just one or two doses.

  • Is it durable? How long will the immunization provided by the vaccine last?

  • Is it effective in all demographics? The elderly often cannot safely take vaccines, which is a problem because they're the age group that needs the new vaccine the most.

UW says that's why, after considering those metrics, they chose to develop an RNA vaccine.

The advantages of an RNA vaccine

UW Medicine's vaccine is not the only vaccine in development, and not even the only one in Washington. A vaccine developed by the Kaiser Permanente Washington Research Institute in Seattle, is about to enter its final trial stage on July 27, when 30,000 people will be tested to see if their shots are strong enough.

But, UW Medicine's is different, in that it is an RNA vaccine that works by inserting genetic code into the patient. That gives the vaccine a few key advantages over the other vaccines in development:

  • The RNA self-replicates, meaning it creates more as it works. This would lower the number of required doses and potentially make it longer-lasting as well.

  • In some ways, it is simpler than other vaccines. It's easier to mass produce, can be stored and is shelf-stable for longer, meaning distribution of the RNA vaccine would be simpler than others.

"Here we can just make the RNA in its own process, store that, and we can add at the bedside, you can just do the formulation," said Jesse Erasmus, a Microbiology Senior Fellow at UW and one of the researchers behind the RNA vaccine.

Additionally, the vaccine has performed well in both young and old mice.

"No other vaccine for SARS-coV-2 has yet addressed is the capability for this vaccine to induce really strong immune responses in both aged as well as young mice," said Fuller. " We were really excited to see that because that means this particular vaccine would have the capability of vaccinating the elderly."

With those advantages in mind, UW Medicine says they plan to move forward as quickly as possible.

A testing timeline

Under normal circumstances, the trial period of a vaccine lasts somewhere between five and seven years, but the coronavirus pandemic is far from normal.

UW Medicine says, if they can meet a few more safety checks, they'll begin testing their vaccine on humans by the end of summer. At that time, they start doing three trial runs of the vaccine. Normally, those trials are done in succession, which is why testing takes up to half a decade. By running them concurrently or overlapping the tests, UW estimates they could be done in 18 months to two years. That's a lot faster, but researchers say it won't endanger patients in any way.

"We're still going to meet all the check marks of safety," said Fuller.

Instead, that risk will be with manufacturers, who would need to heavily invest in the production and manufacture of the vaccine, with the possibility that their production lines would need to be scrapped if the vaccine fails.

Despite that risk, and the months of testing ahead, UW Medicine says they remain optimistic that their work could turn the tides against the pandemic.

"There's a heightened sense of energy, or purpose, and the whole mission in terms of being able to get this out," said Fuller. "Not just to meet this challenge but to get it out as quickly as possible because, as long as it takes to develop a vaccine, more and more people are going to become infected and die."


This article originally appeared on the Seattle Patch