Fighting Covid-19 together

4. Vaccine development in record time

As a rule, it takes between 6 and 15 years before a new vaccine ready for the market becomes available. Vaccine development is highly a complex process. But ex- perts estimate that this could be reduced to between 12 and 18 months in the fight against Covid-19. How is it possible to develop such a vaccine in record time? The crucial factor here is the unique collaboration of the pharma industry and partners from the academic world in global alliances and cross-company projects. Together the companies quickly mobilized additional research and production capacity and are also able to combine several clinical trial phases. As a result, at the end of July, the World Health Organization already counted 165 vaccine candi- dates (139 in preclinical and 26 in clinical trials). These also include several projects of Interpharma members: Johnson & Johnson started a phase 1 trial with its company Janssen and its vaccines site in Bern as early as July.

Highly promising vaccine candidates are also being worked on by AstraZeneca together with the University of Oxford, by Sanofi and GSK, Merck & Co. and also Pfizer in cooperation with the German biotech company BioNTech. A further important aspect of this process is the cooperation with governments and authorities. Further time can be gained in the fight against Covid-19 through faster marketing authorization