The researchers stud the surfaces of these particles with fragments of the proteins that the coronavirus uses to enter human cells the idea is to trick the immune system into producing antibodies that would block the coronavirus during an infection.īecause these particles can’t replicate inside the human body, they’re considered safer than vaccines made from weakened viruses, and the technology has been used to create commercially available vaccines for hepatitis B and human papillomavirus. His team uses harmless, hollow, virus-like particles created in the lab. The race for coronavirus vaccines: a graphical guide “I had to quickly adapt the project,” he says. He was working on vaccines against the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes and the Chikungunya virus, which both cause a lot of illness in Brazil – when COVID-19 began spreading rapidly across the globe. Betting on innovation in BrazilĬabral returned to Brazil in November 2019, after five years in Europe learning about new vaccine technologies. “It does not matter if we start with less funds, but rather that we start,” says Cabral. Instead of waiting to see what happens, researchers across Latin America are working to find their own way out of the pandemic. Some groups are working on ensuring equitable access, but billions of doses will be needed worldwide and no single provider can supply that amount, says Fernando Lobos, a director at Sinergium Biotech, a vaccine maker in Buenos Aires. No one’s coming to rescue us,” says María Elena Bottazzi, a Honduran microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who’s developing a COVID-19 vaccine that she plans to distribute throughout the region by partnering with local vaccine-producing hubs, such as Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. “The only ones who are going to solve the problems in Latin America are going to be us, Latin Americans. Some governments of high-income countries have reportedly tried to buy vaccine-manufacturing companies or acquire a percentage of their supply. “We’ve already seen some monopoly behaviour, even though we don’t have a COVID-19 vaccine yet,” says Gavin Yamey, a global-health researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. On the front lines of the coronavirus-vaccine battleĪs Latin America becomes the new epicentre of COVID-19, concerns are flaring about the prospect of relying on a vaccine developed and manufactured elsewhere, especially given that rich countries have had better access to vaccines in the past 1. Their goals echo long-standing efforts throughout Latin America to capitalize on national knowledge and establish - or re-establish - scientific independence from overseas pharmaceutical companies. But researchers such as Cabral want a back-up plan, in case these well-resourced front runners are not successful, or hoarding or international deal-making prevents them from reaching low- and middle-income countries. A select group of candidates, most of them supported by pharmaceutical companies in China, the United States and Europe, have entered trials in humans. Right now, there is no vaccine for the coronavirus that causes the disease. Now, Cabral, an immunologist at the University of São Paulo, is one of a number of ambitious Latin American scientists who are forging ahead with vaccine research programmes to fight COVID-19. By the time he decided, at 22 years old, to stop this work and study to become a scientist, others were telling him that academic life would not suit him: “It wasn’t for people like me,” he remembers them saying. As a child, he often had to put his schoolwork on hold to help his family, selling ice cream and mangoes at fairs or working at a butcher’s shop in Bahia, in northeastern Brazil. Gustavo Cabral de Miranda is used to people doubting him. Brazil currently has the second highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world.