As the coronavirus rages around the world, scientists are in a race to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19, the infectious respiratory disease caused by the virus, and a drug to treat patients already infected with the virus.
Researchers are working overtime, even as the number of coronavirus cases has crossed 1.2 million and deaths due to it have crossed 65,000 as of April 5, according to Johns Hopkins University.
But even if a vaccine were available today, “it would take at least 12-18 months to put it into the arm of a person who needs to be protected from COVID-19,” says Dr. Donald Alcendor, an infectious disease specialist doing research in molecular biology, neuroscience and virology at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee.
The road from lab creation, to clinical trials, to U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, and ultimately, patient use, is long, expensive, and at times, bumpy. With a patent pending for Meharry’s work on a drug reagent that could someday treat the Zika virus, Alcendor, its principal investigator, is no stranger to the ebb and flow of the research journey.
With the nation’s oldest and largest historically Black academic health science center shuttered because of COVID-19, Alcendor’s usual bustling lab is now quiet and empty. But he is still at work.
On a normal day, Alcendor would be huddled with his research team, likely churning out manuscripts for journal publication, or exploring cells called pericytes and their role in preventing neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s. But since late March, just a few weeks into what became a pandemic, that work has all but stopped.
Realizing the severity of the virus outbreak, Dr. James Hildreth, Meharry’s president, told Alcendor to shift his research focus to the coronavirus. The priority now is to develop an antiviral drug for SARS-CoV-2, the specific coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19. It’s a novel virus that infectious disease experts like Hildreth didn’t know existed until January.
