What we can learn from the Covid vaccine success

The UK’s vac­cine roll­out has been one of the few suc­cess sto­ries of the pan­dem­ic. More than 24 mil­lion peo­ple in the UK have now received at least one dose of a coro­n­avirus vac­cine and the coun­try is on track to inoc­u­late every­one aged 50 and over by mid-April, well ahead of oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries and the Unit­ed States. 

But what does this suc­cess mean for the future of research and devel­op­ment in the health­care indus­try? And do the excep­tion­al cir­cum­stances make it a one-off or can the R&D indus­try learn from it?

A num­ber of fac­tors led to the devel­op­ment of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vac­cine in the UK. These range from increased pub­lic and pri­vate fund­ing spurred on by the cri­sis, to advances in tech­nol­o­gy, the abil­i­ty to con­duct clin­i­cal tri­als in a pop­u­la­tion with high lev­els of virus and a suc­cess­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion between a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny and acad­e­mia. 

But it didn’t hap­pen overnight. Much of the suc­cess is down to the UK’s world-class R&D capac­i­ties and research into malar­ia vac­cines car­ried out over decades. “We weren’t work­ing from a zero base,” says Bryan Deane, direc­tor of new med­i­cines and data pol­i­cy at the Asso­ci­a­tion of the British Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Agency.

Dr Mar­tin Michaelis, pro­fes­sor of mol­e­c­u­lar med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kent, also high­lights the role of R&D in the process. “It’s impor­tant to under­stand this didn’t come out of noth­ing,” he says. “As soon as the sequence of the new virus was avail­able, peo­ple could imme­di­ate­ly start to adapt the vac­cine.”

The rapid devel­op­ment of coro­n­avirus vac­cines has been aid­ed by new tech­niques in vac­cine devel­op­ment. “In the ini­tial stages of R&D, a lot of work is done to nar­row the can­di­dates down,” says Ana Nicholls, man­ag­ing edi­tor of indus­try at the Econ­o­mist Intel­li­gence Unit. “Machine-learn­ing tech­niques can be used to sift through stud­ies very quick­ly to find poten­tial can­di­dates.”

Tech­no­log­i­cal advances and the rapid roll­out of the Covid-19 vac­cine may have changed people’s expec­ta­tions about what is pos­si­ble to achieve and shown what can be achieved with the right invest­ment. 

“The increased focus on col­lab­o­ra­tion with­in the indus­try, between researchers, man­u­fac­tur­ers and sup­ply chains, has achieved results in record time and has now set the bench­mark when it comes to best prac­tice,” says Dr Jen Van­der­hoven, direc­tor of the Nation­al Hori­zons Cen­tre, a bio­science cen­tre based in Dar­ling­ton.

Lessons can be learnt from the UK’s Covid-19 vac­cine suc­cess. A key take­away is the impor­tance of con­tin­ued fund­ing for R&D. The ratio­nale behind fund­ing is also sig­nif­i­cant, with Dr Ohid Yaqub, senior lec­tur­er in the Sci­ence Pol­i­cy Research Unit at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sus­sex, point­ing out that “too much focus on effi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty doesn’t always help”.

“What this exer­cise has shown is that some inno­va­tions can be unseen,” says Yaqub. “What you might want in an R&D sys­tem is a stand­ing army of skilled, trained peo­ple with enough slack in the sys­tem to drop what they’re doing when they need to.” 

Deane points to the “incred­i­ble col­lab­o­ra­tion” between aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions, gov­ern­ments and indus­try that enabled the devel­op­ment of Covid-19 vac­cines. “One of the key learn­ings is that hav­ing col­lab­o­ra­tions has real­ly helped us and are crit­i­cal,” he says.

Reg­u­la­tors also showed a will­ing­ness to use emer­gency autho­ri­sa­tions more wide­ly than they had pre­vi­ous­ly. Dr June Raine, chief exec­u­tive of the Med­i­cines and Health­care prod­ucts Reg­u­la­to­ry Agency (MHRA), says the organ­i­sa­tion wants to embed learn­ings from the pan­dem­ic into its future.

“Com­pa­nies devel­op­ing Covid vac­cines have been invit­ed to dis­cuss their plans with the MHRA and to sub­mit their data for rolling review as soon as it becomes avail­able,” she says. “As of Jan­u­ary 1, rolling review is one of the routes for new mar­ket­ing autho­ri­sa­tion appli­ca­tions.”

Despite the suc­cess in devel­op­ing and rolling out vac­cines at record speed and scale, there remain chal­lenges. Many coun­tries now have a huge debt bur­den, mean­ing fund­ing is like­ly to be an ongo­ing chal­lenge. 

Plus, not all of the lessons from the pan­dem­ic can be neat­ly applied to oth­er areas of sci­ence. Michaelis says: “You can’t trans­fer direct­ly from one area to anoth­er. It’s not like, now in a short time we’ve pro­duced a Covid-19 vac­cine and so we’re going to solve Alzheimer’s dis­ease or be bet­ter with can­cer.”

Devel­op­ing treat­ment is a lengthy process, from iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, to pre-clin­i­cal work and final­ly on to clin­i­cal tri­als, which means there is still a lim­it to the extent drug and treat­ment devel­op­ment can be speed­ed up. “There are a lot of things that need to hap­pen that can’t be com­pro­mised,” says Deane. “Lots needs to be done before we can look at treat­ment in patients, for exam­ple.” 

How­ev­er, over­all the vac­cine suc­cess is like­ly to be pos­i­tive for the future of R&D. “The most impor­tant les­son we should learn as a soci­ety is that basic research is very impor­tant,” says Michaelis. “Most big prob­lems are not solved by applied research, they are solved by our gen­er­al increase in knowl­edge or by serendip­i­ty.”

The glob­al need and rapid response required to tack­le Covid was the cat­a­lyst to do things in a dif­fer­ent way. “The UK bio­science indus­try already knew what it was capa­ble of,” says Van­der­hoven. It just need­ed greater sup­port to scale and accel­er­ate time­frames. 

Deane also believes the vac­cine suc­cess is pos­i­tive for the future of R&D because it’s led to more aware­ness and appre­ci­a­tion for it. “It’s def­i­nite­ly brought the impor­tance of research and devel­op­ment very much into the pub­lic eye,” he con­cludes.