Bill Gates wrote in a blog post on Thursday that he considered eight to 10 candidates for a coronavirus vaccine to be promising.
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder believes it will take 18 months to develop a vaccine, though he says it could come as soon as nine months or take as long as two years.
Alongside candidates that use traditional methods, Gates is particularly excited about two new kinds of vaccines: RNA and DNA vaccines.
More than 100 coronavirus vaccines are in the works, but eight to 10 have caught the eye of Bill Gates.
The billionaire Microsoft fellow benefactor is pouring a huge number of dollars into building up a vaccine through his charitable organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The establishment so far has promised $250 million toward battling the novel coronavirus, and Gates as of late declared that the organization wanted to commit its full assets to the pandemic.
Gates distributed a blog entry on Thursday spreading out the procedure for creating and disseminating a vaccine. He composed that a vaccine was probably going to take around a year and a half to grow, however, he included that it “could be as little as 9 months or as long as two years.”
“As of April 9, there are 115 different COVID-19 vaccine candidates in the development pipeline,” Gates wrote. “I think that eight to ten of those look particularly promising. (Our foundation is going to keep an eye on all the others to see if we missed any that have some positive characteristics, though.)”
Gates said the promising candidates “take a variety of approaches to protect the body against COVID-19,” proceeding to explain how there are two main sorts of vaccine: inactivated and live.
Inactivated vaccines contain a dead form of the ideal pathogen, while live ones contain a littler yet living portion of it. Gates depicted these strategies as customary and dependable yet included that they were asset escalated and delayed to create.
“I’m particularly excited by two new approaches that some of the candidates are taking: RNA and DNA vaccines,” Gates wrote.
“Rather than injecting a pathogen’s antigen into your body, you instead give the body the genetic code needed to produce that antigen itself. When the antigens appear on the outside of your cells, your immune system attacks them — and learns how to defeat future intruders in the process. You essentially turn your body into its own vaccine manufacturing unit.”
Though the Gates Foundation has been researching RNA vaccines for almost a decade, they are yet to make it out into the wild. “Since COVID would be the first RNA vaccine out of the gate, we have to prove both that the platform itself works and that it creates immunity,” Gates said. “It’s a bit like building your computer system and your first piece of software at the same time.”
A key challenge around producing a vaccine for COVID-19 is that a coronavirus vaccine has never been developed to date.
But the Microsoft billionaire has said numerous times that a return to total normality is impossible without a vaccine.
“Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus,” he wrote. “Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine.”