A new COVID-19 vaccine, developed by researchers from the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, is being offered patent-free to vaccine manufacturers across the world. Human trials have shown the vaccine to be safe and effective, with India already authorizing its use as production ramps up to over 100 million doses per month.
The vaccine has been named Corbevax and it is based on a traditional protein-based technology that has been safely used for decades. Like other COVID-19 vaccines, Corbevax focuses on the coronavirus spike protein, but instead of using mRNA to direct our cells to produce those spike proteins internally it delivers lab-grown spike proteins to the body.
The researchers took the gene that codes for the spike protein and engineered yeast to produce it. These proteins are collected, purified, and combined with an adjuvant to enhance immune responses. This exact method has been used to produce the hepatitis B vaccine for years.
“Protein-based vaccines have been widely used to prevent many other diseases, have proven safety records, and use economies of scale to achieve low-cost scalability across the world,” says Maria Elena Bottazzi, one of the lead researchers on the project.
It can not be overstates how important it is that this vaccine
can be stored in a normal refrigerator and is easy to produce with affordable standard equipment that is already available almost everywhere because low-income countries have been using this same equipment to create hepatitis B vaccines. As a result, production cost will also be low: about $1.5 – $2 per dose.Other cool things:
They deliberately made the vaccine vegan and halal to make sure more people are willing to take it.
These researchers aren’t just doing this because they’re ‘too late to cash in’. They have a track record of releasing patent-less vaccines and for the last two decades have focused on creating vaccines that are considered ‘not profitable enough’, like vaccines for parasites that primarily occur in low-income regions.
More paywall-free articles (in English) about it!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/15/corbevax-covid-vaccine-texas-scientists
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/14/us-researchers-share-covid-19-vaccine-with-the-world
New patent-free COVID vaccine developed as “gift to the world”
Spencer Witcraft 