Vietnam makes progress in developing COVID-19 vaccine

VABIOTECH has finished the first phase of the vaccine development two months early (Photo: VNA)

In the next phase, the candidate vaccine would be completed and stabilised to meet requirements for human use (Photo: VNA)

The research team would also develop procedures for commercial production of up to dozens of millions of doses (Photo: VNA)

The COVID-19 vaccine development project not only gives birth to a new vaccine but more importantly, it would help Vietnam be more active in vaccine production in response to pandemics (Photo: VNA)

In the future, in case a new strain of coronavirus causes another disease for humans, with the available technology, researchers just replace the gene of the current one with the gene of the new strain, so it would soon produce a new vaccine (Photo: VNA)

According to experts, while Vietnam itself has a vaccine manufacturing industry, this is the first time a vector-based vaccine is being developed, so plenty of caution is needed (Photo: VNA)

For this method, researchers use the SARS-CoV-2 antigen to insert into another pathogenic virus that has been weakened to be introduced into the immunised subjects, which hopefully would trigger the body to generate antibodies that are capable of defending against the onslaught of the actual full-fledged virus (Photo: VNA)

If the antigen generates good immune responses, candidate vaccines will be developed and tested on a wider range of animals – especially in larger mammals like monkeys – to test the immune responses before going onto clinical trials on humans (Photo: VNA)