6.4 Other Vaccine Approaches
Aside from the aforementioned approaches, Genexine Inc. is exploring a new vaccine via utilizing the Hyleukin-7 platform technology (Genexine, 2020). Such a platform may improve the immune responses fusing IL-7 with hyFc, aiming to hybridize IgD and IgG4 for the long-term effect of Fc fusion proteins. Specifically, IgD possesses a flexible hinge structure and can maximize the biological activity (Genexine, 2020; Seo et al., 2014). IgG4 possesses an unexposed junction site that mitigates immunogenicity via preventing antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (Løset et al., 2004; J.-H. Lee et al., 2013). This corporation reported enhanced vaccine efficacy, lung T cell accumulation, and plasmacytoid dendritic cell growth after Fc-fused IL-7 treatment in the virus infection models (Kang et al., 2017).
Conclusions and inspirations
Despite prodigious global efforts made to contain SARS-CoV-2, the current COVID-19 epidemic has expanded into a full-blown pandemic, yielding outright panic and economic slowdown. Health-care systems in many regions are overburdened and under-resourced, impelling medical workers and governors to make formerly unthinkable judgments concerning the allotment of medical care. In the wake of such a severe situation, a number of researches have trailed strategies to tackling the direct impact of COVID-19, either by modeling studies of the viral activity or via parsing out potential therapeutic options and finding a vaccine to end the coronavirus pandemic. Although the development of therapeutics and vaccines for the COVID-19 therapy is still in its middle stage, some marked advances have been made from complete genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 to the clinical practice of COVID-19 vaccines.
Rapid genome-wide association of SARS-CoV-2, along with international sharing of information, enabled us to generate rapider and more proper diagnostic tools. As set forth, the major fashioned diagnostic tools are qRT-PCR-based approaches, requiring a long time for specimen preparation and analysis, thus putting off the imperative actions for COVID-19 infections. Of note,
In acute respiratory infections, RT-PCR is commonly utilized for detecting pathogenic viruses in respiratory secretions. The positive rate of PCR from oropharyngeal swabs is not very high, implicating the requirement of more swab testing are need to confirm the diagnosis. With the continuous spread of SARS-CoV-2, there is a desperate demand to develop rapid diagnostic methods that can be tested more efficiently.
According to reports, certain drugs are known to effectively treat patients with COVID-19. Nevertheless, the lack of clinical data may render the clinical prognosis difficult to predict. In addition to the judicious design of novel therapeutics that target viral replication or immunopathology, currently, rapid screening of therapeutic agents to repurpose FDA-approved and well-characterized agents might be a more workable method. Considering the severity of the recent zoonotic coronavirus outbreaks, therapeutic drugs for pancoronavirus should be carried out to cope with future outbreaks.
With respect to the detailed exploitation of COVID-19 vaccines, several pharmaceutical corporations and institutions have also launched the project for vaccine development. Notwithstanding, the commercial market for vaccines, especially vaccines for emerging infectious diseases, is confined by the high cost and time required for vaccine development along with the uncertainty of profitability. Accordingly, CEPI is combining efforts to encourage the progress of vaccines against COVID-19. Besides, in the near future, the production of a lot of vaccines may bring about the challenge in scaling up manufacturing quickly, because the infrastructure needed will differ in virtue of the vaccine type. Another concern regarding the vaccine development may be the antibody-dependent enhancement issue.
In addition, this global epidemic crisis indicated that host-species expansion or interspecies transmission of neoteric coronavirus to humans might be unavoidable. Clinicians and researchers should combine efforts to swiftly evolve our perception of all facets of SARS-CoV-2 infections and fill in the gaps concerning the emergence of this virus. Ultimately, we can also learn from this epidemic that we need to improve our disease monitoring and surveillance system to prevent such a serious disease outbreak. Digital technologies such as big-data analytics, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technology may also need to be fully exploited and developed, thereby enabling real-time data collection at scale and modeling risk associations immediately to contain the pathophoresis.
Overall, the challenges posed by twenty-first century epidemics are real and changing: future epidemics will be fueled by various internal and external causes. In our response, we must view pandemics as interconnected cycles, not isolated events, and while we cannot forecast specific outbreaks, we can make provision for them.