One Of 7 COVID-19 Vaccines Backed By Bill Gates Will Be Entering Human Testing

In an interview with Trevor Noah from The Daily Show last Friday, Bill Gates said that he would fund the building of factories for the seven most potent vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

And now, one of the seven vaccines will be entering Phase 1 clinical trial on humans to test its safety.

Called INO-4800, the vaccine was developed by Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a pharmaceutical biotechnology company in Pennsylvania.

In this first phase of testing, Inovo scientists plan to vaccinate 40 healthy adults in Philadephia, Kansas City, Missouris, USA.

Volunteers in Philadelphia will receive the vaccines at Philadelphia’s Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania while volunteers in Kansas will get their shots at the Center for Pharmaceutical Research, Kansas City.

Each volunteer will be receiving two doses of the vaccine. Each will be four weeks apart. Inovio said that the results of the test would come out by the end of summer. If the results are positive, the company will immediately begin Phase II testing to evaluate the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Inovio is a well-known company in the field of vaccine research. When the MERSS outbreak broke out in 2012, they were one of the first companies to develop a vaccine for the disease.

So when the new COVID-19 started to break out in China, Inovio scientists had been constantly monitoring it and began researching for a vaccine early on.

By January, when the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was published by Chinese scientists, confirming that it was a Coronavirus, Inovio scientists then compared the virus’s genome to the vaccines that they have in their collection.

Like MERS and SARS, the new virus causing the COVID-19 outbreak belongs to the Coronaviruses family, a group of viruses that has protein spikes and uses RNS as genetic material. Unfortunately, the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is too different from MERS. So it isn’t possible to use the old vaccine that they developed for MERS.

So they started searching for a new vaccine. Only after three hours, Inovio came out with a preclinical vaccine that can potentially beat COVID-19.

With so many people being infected with the virus, it is critical to find a working vaccine. Bill Gates, through his foundation, has pledged to build seven factories for seven most potential vaccines.

Gates said that even if we ended up picking the two most effective vaccines and he would be losing billions of dollars on five unused factories, it would still be worth it.

If we are lucky, we are 18 months away from producing a COVID-19 vaccine. Inovio said that during this time, with the funding that it received from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, it could make 1 million doses of INO-4800 vaccine by the end of 2020.

The virus is believed to have come from Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which is a trading place for wildlife. On 23 January, to prevent the virus from spreading, the Chinese authorities put the city under lockdown. Some airlines have also suspended their flights to mainland China.

After the disease broke out, people started blaming the Chinese for consuming odd creatures such as bats, frogs, and snakes. And according to researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the genome sequenced taken from seven patients were reportedly 96% identical to coronavirus from bats.

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