San Pedro Sula, Honduras
To obtain funds, the Baylor College of Medicine Vaccine Development Center in Houston, which co-directs a Honduran scientistIt will take a year and a half to get the vaccine that could be the response that the international community is looking forward to.
Maria Elena Bottazzi, graduated in Microbiology from the National Autonomous University of Honduras (Unah, 1989), along with his colleague Peter Hotez, co-direct a team of almost 30 people focused on developing vaccines for tropical and emerging diseases such as coronavirus.
In 2011, the Vaccine Development Center received funds from the United States National Institute of Health to develop a vaccine for acute and severe respiratory syndrome (SARS), caused by the coronavirus.
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Processes After receiving the funds, the first step, in case of developing the vaccine, will be to test it in a coronavirus strain that exists at the University of Texas at Galveston to see if it gives the expected results. – |
That vaccine was developed five years later and manufactured with a consortium to be used in preclinical and clinical studies, but in that same 2016, the importance of SARS had diminished and the team failed to finalize the funds after its production.
Now the new coronavirus, which began in December in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei province, has been extended to more than 30 countries and its genetic code is quite similar to SARS.
“We propose that the vaccine that we already have in our freezeres and that it was developed for the SARS-1 virus, it possibly has the ability to protect even partially the virus that is currently circulating in the populations, ”Bottazzi said in an interview with Diario LA PRENSA.
To make the experimental ones stored in the freezer of the Vaccine Development Center become the best candidate to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, researchers require funding.
If financial resources are achieved, it is a matter of six to nine months for the team to obtain permission to start having clinical studies, which take a year to complete the entire safety profile and at the same time, techniques are developed to evaluate the potential effectiveness, through in vitro laboratory studies.
“From here to half a year we could have an answer to determine if this vaccine can be used in high-risk populations,” said Bottazzi.
The objective of the researchers is to give priority to high-risk populations, that is, those who work in hospitals, health care providers and the population of legal age.
Research is being carried out in collaboration with the University of Texas and in constant communication with the World Health Organization (WHO), government entities of the United States and research groups in different Asian countries.
“It has to be a global effort, where we can also share our results and others share their results. For our part, we are putting our publications in the public domain and giving interviews so that everyone knows what each group is doing and thus have a more concerted and organized response, ”he added Bottazzi.
For the scientific, the population Honduran You must have confidence in the National Health Entities, “who do very good work”, while urging you to remain calm, inform yourself through official channels and above all, prevent, with simple actions such as washing your hands, avoiding crowded places and in case of flu, rest and seek medical attention.
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