By Mary O’KEEFE

The City of Hope is now in phase 1 clinical trials with a SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] vaccine.
“We started in February of this year, like many of the other [companies],” said Don Diamond, Ph.D., who is a professor with City of Hope’s Dept. of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation.
Diamond added the hospital’s vaccine research and development has been done at a much faster pace than anything he has previously experienced.

“This would be my fourth vaccine I have brought to the clinic,” he said. “The three others took many more years and I guess you could say that this has been a learning experience.”
He added the development of the COVID-19 vaccine has been five to 10 times faster than any of his previous clinical products.

“There are a lot of similarities to recent outbreaks of other coronaviruses that cross from the animal kingdom into humans,” he said. “The one that might come to mind is SARS; that was in 2003. That was a huge deal at the time.”

SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] is a viral respiratory illness caused by a coronavirus. It was first reported in Asia in February 2003. It spread to more than two dozen countries in North America, South America, Europe and Asia before it was contained, according the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].

“[SARS] snuffed itself out, not because people were more careful; it just doesn’t have the properties of being as transmissible person to person,” Diamond said.

Another dangerous coronavirus of recent times is MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome]. Three or four of every 10 patients who reportedly contracted MERS died. The virus was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. So far, all cases of MERS have been linked through travel to, or residence in, countries in and near the Arabian Peninsula. The largest known outbreak of MERS outside the Arabian Peninsula occurred in the Republic of Korea in 2015. The outbreak was associated with a traveler returning from the Arabian Peninsula, according to the CDC.

Diamond added that SARS is much more deadly than COVID-19. It kills its host more rapidly, which means it doesn’t have the opportunity to spread.

“You get very sick and then are not likely to go out of your house,” he said.

People can be asymptomatic with COVID-19 and therefore spread the virus without knowing they have it.

“The oddity of this current [coronavirus] is that it doesn’t make [some] as sick. When you are feeling rather chipper in fact you are transmitting it at a very high level,” he said.

Genetics can be why some are predisposed to having a worse outcome when contracting COVID-19.
“There is very little you can do about it,” he said.

Pfizer and Moderna are among the companies asking the FDA for emergency use authorization. This will allow the public, outside those involved in clinical trials, to receive the vaccine. This will protect a person from acquiring COVID-19 or, at the least, “tamp it down,” according to Diamond.

“Our vaccine developed at City of Hope has the same idea [as others but] we used a different platform that we invented here,” he said.

There will most likely be booster shots required no matter what vaccine is administrated.

“Normally if you get a virus protection [vaccine] your immunity lasts quite a long time or a lifetime,” he said.

Vaccines like those administered to fight measles, mumps, Rubella and chickenpox will give a person lifelong immunity; however, the coronavirus is different.

“There are seven coronaviruses; four of them are very common and they give you colds that resolve in a couple of days. You don’t have these long haul or long-lasting side effects,” Diamond said.

A person’s immunity can be measured for that specific coronavirus, but that immunity disappears in about a year so a person can get a cold virus all over again.

“The fact is we don’t know precisely what will happen with this particular coronavirus. We suspect that if you have had a severe case [of COVID-19] your body will remember it was attacked and your immunity could last quite a long time,” he said. “If you had a very mild case we don’t know it.”

He is not certain how long the antibodies will stay in a person’s system or if those antibodies would decrease to a point where it no longer protects the person.

“We do know that there is a relationship of the severity of the infection with how quickly your antibody levels fall. The key question that we don’t know is if they fall do they fall underneath the protective level? We don’t know that yet,” he said. “All of these types of vaccines that we have used in the past have required booster shots. There are some vaccines that don’t, but they are in a different class.”

These past vaccines include giving a person a weaker form of the actual pathogen that gives them a mild infection; however, the COVID-19 vaccine is a much different design.

“These [vaccines] will never give you the actual disease,” he said. “They are totally different and so they’re much safer, far safer.”

City of Hope and Diamond are trying to accelerate the trial period process then will apply for the emergency use authorization. They are looking for volunteers for the first phase. Volunteers need to be healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 55. In the next phase they will be looking at higher risk volunteers.

“Based on preclinical research, we are hopeful that the vaccine will protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection that can lead to COVID-19 disease, helping to halt the spread of the current COVID-19 pandemic,” Diamond said.

The trial’s goal is to test how safe the investigational vaccine is and how well it is tolerated.

To produce the investigational vaccine, a team of City of Hope scientists, led by Felix Wussow, Ph.D., and Flavia Chiuppesi, Ph.D., both City of Hope assistant research professors in the Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation, together with Diamond, first developed a synthetic modified vaccinia ankara (sMVA) platform technology to house the genetic components that make up the compound at a molecular level. MVA is a weakened poxvirus that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the prevention of smallpox and monkeypox, and is also included in the federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile for lifesaving use during a public health emergency, according to the City of Hope.

Anyone who is interested in volunteering can email CovidVaccine@coh.org.