Canadian firm comes out with Coronavirus vaccine

A Canadian company says that it has produced a COVID-19 vaccine just 20 days after receiving the coronavirus’s genetic sequence, using a unique technology that they soon hope to submit for FDA approval.

Medicago CEO, Bruce Clark said his company could produce as many as 10 million doses a month. If regulatory hurdles can be cleared, he said in a Thursday interview, the vaccine could start to become available in November 2021.

An Israeli research lab has also claimed to have created a vaccine. But Clark says his company’s technique, which has already been proven effective in producing vaccines for seasonal flu, is more reliable and easier to scale.

Medicago does not work with a live virus. Instead, it uses plants, a relatively new approach that has seen much advancement in the past decade. It inserts a genetic sequence into agrobacterium, a soil bacterium, which is taken up by plants in this case, a close cousin to tobacco. The plant begins to produce the protein that can then be used as a vaccine. If the virus begins to mutate, as is expected for COVID-19, they can just update the production using new plants.

“That is the difference between us” and egg-based methods, he said, “We go directly to producing the vaccine or the antibody without having to propagate the virus.”

“Using plants and genetically engineered agro bacteria works faster than eggs also make the vaccine much easier to produce at scale”, he concluded.

Clark says that once they get the green light, they will be able to produce 10 million vaccine doses a month.

Also, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health, told the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee that human trials for a vaccine (he did not specify the manufacturer) would be possible “within a few weeks.

”However, he said that a vaccine would not be available to the broader public for another 12 to 18 months.