Vancouver — The SARS vaccine testing that has reportedly started on humans in Beijing is the culmination of research that got a boost in Vancouver and was accelerated by the Internet, suggests Dr. Steven Jones of Vancouver's Genome Science Centre, where the virus was sequenced.
China's Xinhua news agency reported Sunday that four volunteers were injected with the vaccine at Beijing's China-Japan Friendship Hospital on Saturday.
The SARS virus was first sequenced in Vancouver April 12, 2003, a week after the World Health Organization warned travellers to avoid Hong Kong and China's Guangdong province where the virus first appeared in humans.
Dr. Jones said the Internet distribution of the genome sequence has been vital to international research on the development of vaccines.
“It's really been an acceleration of that process,” Dr. Jones said. “There's been a number of vaccine initiatives ... which were able to capitalize on the availability of the sequence and to come up with the proteins which would elicit an immune response.”
SARS vaccine development is being actively pursued around the globe but experts had predicted it could take several years before one could be developed.
Without the Internet and special open-source software, Dr. Jones said, the dissemination of the SARS data would have involved taking several months to write the research paper, a month or more for peer review of the data and up to six months for it to get into the medical journals.
Dr. Jones spoke Sunday at the Society for Computer Applications in Radiology conference in Vancouver.
SARS has killed more than 700 people around the world with most of the deaths occurring in Asia. The disease claimed 44 lives in the Toronto area last summer.
