The challenges of developing a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine

The goal of a vaccine is to trigger a response that safely protects against an infection and/or the burden of disease. While this is true for all vaccines, the steps leading to a safe and effective product can be different for each infection. In the case of COVID-19, caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital have found that vaccine design can face specific challenges and that vaccine development approaches require an understanding of how the immune system naturally responds to a specific infection as well as how vaccines might trigger specific protective responses.

The National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's, co-led by Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Dr. Peter Hotez, currently are developing coronavirus vaccines. The researchers are applying their years of experience developing vaccines for neglected tropical and emerging infectious diseases such as SARS and MERS to develop a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine.

"As we proceed with the designing and testing of vaccine candidates, we felt the need to collaborate with a clinical immunologist, who also is engaged in basic and translational research, so that together we can inform our vaccine development efforts and ensure we evaluate both the protective mechanisms and avoid inducing any undesirable immunological responses that have been associated with some respiratory viruses," said Bottazzi, professor of pediatrics and of molecular virology and microbiology and associate dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor.

Bottazzi and Hotez approached Baylor's pulmonologist Dr. David Corry, professor of immunology, allergy and rheumatology and Fulbright Endowed Chair in Pathology in the Department of Pathology & Immunology. He also is a member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

One of the outcomes of their collaboration is the recent publication of two papers, one in Microbes and Infection and the other in Nature Reviews Immunology.

"These publications are the result of an in-depth literature search and analysis that has informed our vaccine development strategy. We highlight experimental and clinical evidence showing some of the challenges toward the development of COVID-19 vaccines -- what we know and what we don't know -- and the critical points we should pay close attention to as we advance and evaluate our vaccine candidates," Bottazzi said.