WINNIPEG — Canadian scientists have developed SARS vaccines so quickly that they're being stockpiled in case of emergency and will be tested on ferrets within weeks.
The promising results of research by the British Columbia-based SARS Accelerated Vaccine Initiative (SAVI) were announced Monday at a SARS symposium in Winnipeg.
The loosely knit group of researchers has spent seven months searching for a vaccine that could protect people against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Developing a vaccine normally takes about a decade, but SAVI has already tested three vaccines on mice and rabbits.
That rapid progress was made possible by a collaborative approach in which scientists were given funding for their projects literally overnight, said Brett Findlay, a professor at the University of British Columbia's biotechnology laboratory, who is leading the SAVI project.
“This is a new way of doing research, than the traditional, grind-it-out, write-a-grant approach,” Dr. Findlay told the gathering of SARS experts from around the world.
Researchers plan to inject ferrets with three different vaccines some time this month. After two inoculations, the animals will be forced to breathe SARS-infected air, either by fitting them with ventilator masks or by placing them in aerosol chambers.
Exposing a ferret to a potentially deadly virus is tricky work, Dr. Findlay said: “It's very dangerous, so you want to make sure you get it right.”
If the inoculated ferrets are resistant to SARS, Dr. Findlay said, the best vaccine will be selected for tests with macaque monkeys. Human tests are possible as soon as September, he said, if the re-emergence of SARS causes a need for the vaccine.
Health officials are already collecting the vaccines just in case they need to protect Canadians from another outbreak, Dr. Findlay said.
“We've been stockpiling small amounts of vaccine,” he said. “Even though it's not approved we could use in a setting if we had do, say as a ring vaccination to control a particular outbreak.”
Only one group of Chinese researchers is developing a SARS vaccine more quickly than the Canadian group. The Chinese have already begun tests on primates, but the World Health Organization expressed concerns last week that the vaccine could actually make people more vulnerable to the virus.
The same risks exist for one of the vaccines under development in Canada, but two other types are also being tested.
Even if the hunt for a SARS vaccine is successful, researchers say, Canada lacks any facilities for producing some of them. Certain vaccines are manufactured by neutralizing dangerous live samples of the virus, which would require a so-called Level 3 facility that meets a pharmaceutical standard known as Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP).
“It's a problem of scalability of production,” said Rafick Sekaly, scientific director of the Canadian Network for Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics. “There are very few facilities right now in the world that can produce such vaccines, and this is going to be a major problem.”
Governments should spend the tens of millions of dollars necessary to construct the high-level manufacturing facilities in Canada, Dr. Sekaly said.
“There is no GMP facility in Canada. So if we wanted to produce the vaccine, we wouldn't know where to produce it. It's not only a problem in Canada, but I think we need to build some.”
Not everybody at the conference was clamouring for new manufacturing facilities, however. Frank Plummer, scientific director of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, said the shortage of laboratory space is more acute. Vaccine researchers should focus on developing products that can be manufactured without such rigorous safety precautions, he said.
“If you're worried about the people making it, how would you give it to people?” Dr. Plummer said.
