Dr. Deborah Fuller, professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, has worked on a vaccine to combat the coronavirus since January. Fuller and her team at UW Medicine have created an RNA vaccine that has the potential to be more effective and cost efficient — requiring minimal refrigeration and fewer doses. By working with HDT Bio Corp., Fuller hopes to start Phase 1 clinical trials at the end of the summer, using 50 volunteers to test dose size and safety, she said.
Can you give me an overview of the progress that you have made on your vaccine research?
Our RNA vaccine that we designed is actually different from (U.S. vaccine developer) Moderna’s. There are two components of RNA vaccines that are very important. Ours differ in both of those components. First of all, the RNA is different in that we made it into a replicating RNA vaccine. Once (RNA) gets to the cell and starts to replicate itself, it makes more copies of the code, so you make more vaccine proteins and get a higher, stronger immune response.
We’re in collaboration with a biotech company in Seattle called HDT Bio, who manufactures a different type of nanocarrier where the RNA goes outside instead of having to be put on the inside (of the nanocarrier). That allowed us to actually manufacture the RNA vaccine and the nanocarrier separately and store them long term.
In terms of funding and staff, what was the process of getting this vaccine research started and continuing it amid the pandemic?
I’ve been working in nucleic acid vaccines for all of my career. When we first started working on it, we had already envisioned and realized their potential as a rapid response technology for future pandemics. We already had funding from the National Institutes of Health for developing some of our platforms for a potential future influenza pandemic, because you always have flu pandemics.
When Covid-19 came out, it was very simple for us to pivot very quickly and switch from influenza to replace and all that. We already had the people in place with the expertise and skills and knowledge to quickly make a vaccine. The biggest challenge when we first got started was actually to find that funding. I had to get approval from the National Institutes of Health to do an emergency reallocation of some of our funding. That allowed us to get started right away in January.
How did you get started developing your model?
Right away in January when the sequence for the SARS-CoV-2 virus was published, that allowed us to immediately start to make vaccines. Nucleic acid vaccines like RNA and DNA have that advantage over other types of vaccines because you don’t need the pathogen — all you need is a sequence for the pathogen, then you can make your vaccine.
Once we saw that they worked, we went into a preclinical non-human primate model. … We knew if we could get the vaccine to work well in non-human primates, that would be a very good sign for its potential to be used in humans. We started immunizing them in the spring, and after a single immunization, we were able to induce levels of antibodies that have been shown in other studies to be sufficient to provide protection (from the virus).
