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 Speaking to Reuters ahead of announcing the labs involved, Melanie
Saville, director of vaccine R&D at the Coalition for Epidemic
Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), said the idea was to "compare
apples with apples" as drugmakers race to develop an effective shot
to help control the COVID-19 pandemic.
The centralised network is the first of its kind to be set up in
response to a pandemic.
In a network spanning Europe, Asia and North America, the labs will
centralise analysis of samples from trials of COVID-19 candidates
"as though vaccines are all being tested under one roof", Saville
said, aiming to minimise the risk of variation in results.
"When you start off (with developing potential new vaccines)
especially with a new disease, everyone develops their own assays,
they all use different protocols and different reagents - so while
you get a readout, the ability to compare between different
candidates is very difficult," she told Reuters.
"By taking the centralised lab approach ... it will give us a chance
to really make sure we are comparing apples with apples."
The CEPI network will initially involve six labs, one each in
Canada, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and India,
Saville said.
Hundreds of potential COVID-19 vaccines are in various stages of
development around the world, with shots developed in Russia and
China already being deployed before full efficacy trials have been
done, and front-runners from Pfizer <PFE.N>, Moderna <MRNA.O> and
AstraZeneca <AZN.L> likely to have final-stage trial results before
year-end.
Typically, the immunogenicity of potential vaccines is assessed in
individual lab analyses, which aim to see whether biomarkers of
immune response - such as antibodies and T-cell responses - are
produced after clinical trial volunteers receive a dose, or doses,
of the vaccine candidate.
But with more than 320 COVID-19 vaccine candidates in the works,
Saville said, the many differences in data collection and evaluation
methods are an issue.
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As well as potential variations in markers of immunity, there are differences in
how and where samples are collected, transported and stored - all of which can
impact the quality and usefulness of the data produced, and make comparisons
tricky.
And with a range of different vaccine technologies being explored - from viral
vector vaccines to ones based on messenger RNA - standard evaluation of their
true potential "becomes very complex", she said.
"With hundreds of COVID-19 vaccines in development ... it's essential that we
have a system that can reliably evaluate and compare the immune response of
candidates currently undergoing testing," she said.
By centralising the analysis in a lab network, much of what Saville called the
"inter-laboratory variability" can be removed, allowing for head-to-head
comparisons.
CEPI says all developers of potential COVID-19 vaccines can use the centralised
lab network for free to assess their candidates against a common protocol. For
now, the network will assess samples from early-stage vaccine candidate testing
and first and second stage human trials, but CEPI said it hoped to expand its
capacity to late stage (Phase III) trial data in the coming months.
Results produced by the network will be sent back to the developer, with neither
CEPI nor the network owning the data.
CEPI itself is co-funding nine of the potential COVID-19 vaccines in
development, including candidates from Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax <NVAX.O>
and CureVac.
(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Mark Potter)
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