The first participant in the trial, which is being funded by the National Institutes of Health and taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, will receive the experimental vaccine on Monday, the AP reported.
It would take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine, the AP added, citing public health officials. Meanwhile Israeli scientists are on the cusp of developing a vaccine themselves. Israeli scientists have, for the last four years, already been developing a vaccine against infectious bronchitis virus, which affects poultry. “Our basic concept was to develop the technology and not specifically a vaccine for this kind or that kind of virus,” said Dr. Chen Katz, MIGAL’s biotechnology group leader.After scientists sequenced the DNA of the novel coronavirus causing the current worldwide outbreak, the MIGAL (The Galilee Research Institute) researchers examined it and found that the poultry coronavirus has high genetic similarity to the human one, and that it uses the same infection mechanism, which increases the likelihood of achieving an effective human vaccine in a very short period of time, according to Katz.Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman contributed to this article.