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May 30, 2003

INTERNATIONAL IMMUNIZATION NEWS

“A SARS Vaccine in Three Years?”

Associated Press (www.ap.org) (05/27/03); Haney, Daniel Q.

The decision by federal agencies to promote a plan for a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) vaccine within three years is a questionable one, as all parties involved are likely to agree; traditionally, vaccines take as long as 20 years or more to develop, making the three-year time frame a significant difference.  Lead researcher Dr. Gary Nabel, chief of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. is supportive of the time line, suggesting that his teams will be able to complete their laboratory and animal testing in just one year, followed by two years of human testing before submitting a vaccine to the FDA for approval.  Nabel is in charge of two research groups, one of which is focusing on developing a vaccine the traditional way, using weakened or killed virus to stimulate an immune response, while the other is using state-of-the-art gene-splicing tools to create a vaccine wholly independent from the virus itself.  The reason for the speed, concern, and multi-track development is that no one knows how widely SARS will spread or how many people it will kill before it is fully contained, but government officials all agree that the public cannot wait to observe the virus' deadliness and needs a response immediately.