Vaccine Development for Coronavirus is The New Race Between Leading Pharmaceutical & Nutraceutical Companies

The pandemic of coronavirus is not taking a stop and practically all the countries in the world, in one way or another are being affected by it. The prolonged lockdown is not an option for the majority of the countries, the demand for a vaccine is at an all-time high. The pharmaceutical and nutraceutical companies are pouring their researches and innovative techniques to design the vaccine. The SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence was released in January and the development has been done at a very rapid pace since then. The majority of the companies and researchers are looking at the previously performed studies on SARS and MERS in order to get ahead of the lot. There are majorly fifteen life sciences companies that are pouring the majority of their resources into it.

Pfizer is one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the world, they have been developing a vaccine with BioNtech as their partner, they are looking to produce mRNA based COVID-19 vaccine. Coming towards GlaxoSmithKline, they have partnered up with the University of Queensland, clover Biopharmaceuticals and Xiamen Biotech Co. Inovio pharmaceuticals have already completed their pretrial of vaccine candidates called INO-4800 and they are moving on to clinical trials. Novavax had several vaccine candidates in pre-clinical animal trials and now they have introduced NVX-CoV2373 as their primary vaccine candidate for the COVID-19. Sanofi is also another leading life science corporation and they have partnered up with Translate Bio and BARDA, they are also in pretrial stages with their mRNA platform.

Heat Biologics has partnered up with the University of Miami in order to develop a vaccine for the COVID-19, they introduced their vaccine candidate gp96 which is among the 41 vaccine candidates being considered by WHO. BioNTech is primarily a cancer-related company, but they have high expertise in mRNA-based vaccines and they are working with Pfizer to develop one. Vaxart is working on an oral vaccine candidate and they believe that it can provide a much easier logistics solution as compared to conventional vaccines as it is to be delivered everywhere in the world. Vir Biotechnology has already developed a candidate with an antibody-based approach and it is about to move into the clinical testing phase.

Moderna Therapeutics is one of the first companies to develop batches of COVID-19 vaccines and they are expecting to conclude their trials by March 2021. The emergent bio solution is taking a different approach by developing a vaccine candidate that will try and leverage the immune response of the host, and have derived the vaccine from the antibodies of patients who were positive with coronavirus. Dyanax is working with Queensland University and is expected to develop a vaccine in the near future. Geovax has immense experience in immunotherapies and they are using that experience to develop a candidate for the COVID-19 vaccine. They are about to start manufacturing and human testing. Finally, Curevac is expected to take its vaccine candidate into testing by June.

All of these companies are pouring huge resources into this and they should use software like pharmaceutical ERP in order to effectively manage these resources. Pharmaceutical ERP is mainly developed to work within the guidelines of the pharmaceutical industry and hence can be a productive solution to use.