Scientists Are Developing Cheaper, Patent-Free and Easier-to-Make COVID Vaccine

Researchers at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine are developing a COVID-19 vaccine using a conventional method that will make the production and distribution cheaper and more accessible for countries most affected by the pandemic and where new variants are likely to originate due to low inoculation rates. The team, led by Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, and Maria Bottazzi, PhD, has been developing vaccine prototypes for SARS and MERS since 2011, which they reconstructed to create the new COVID vaccine, dubbed Corbevax, or “the world’s COVID-19 vaccine.” And, while more than 60 other vaccines are in development using the same technology, Dr. Bottazzi said their vaccine is unique because they do not intend to patent it, allowing anyone with the capacity to reproduce it.

Corbevax’s clinical trial data has yet to be released due to resource constraints, but Texas Children’s hospital said the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective against the original COVID-19 strain and more than 80 percent effective against the Delta variant. The vaccine’s efficacy against the Omicron variant is currently being tested.

The process to create the vaccine involves the use of yeast, called recombinant protein sub-unit technology, which places an actual piece of COVID- 19’s spike protein in yeast cells. The yeast cells then copy the vital protein and the protein is introduced to the immune system. This is the same method by which hepatitis B vaccines are produced. “Pretty much anybody that can make hepatitis B vaccines or has the capacity to produce microbial-based protein-like bacteria or yeast, can replicate what we do,” Dr. Bottazzi said. In contrast, the Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines currently authorized in the U.S. use different technologies that are not shared with other companies. Crucially, storing the Corbevax vaccine only requires standard refrigeration, unlike the Pfizer vaccine, which requires ultra-cold storage in transit.

According to Dr. Bottazzi, the reason she and her team did not patent the vaccine was because of her team’s shared philosophy of humanitarianism and to engage in collaboration with the wider scientific community: “We want to do good in the world. This was the right thing to do, and this is what we morally had to do. We didn’t even blink. We didn’t think, ‘how can we take advantage of this?’ You see now that if more like us would have been more attuned to how the world is so inequitable and how we could have helped from the beginning so many places around the world without thinking ‘what’s going to be in it for me?’ we could have basically not even seen these variants arise.”

Dr. Bottazzi hopes her move will incentivize others to follow suit and make affordable and accessible vaccines for other diseases and viruses such as hookworm.