Barney Graham is in a race against time to develop vaccines that reduce the severity of COVID-19

Researchers at Sinovac Biotech in Beijing are working on a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2.Credit: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty

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Barney Graham and his team are one of more than 150 vaccine developers racing against time to develop vaccines that reduce the severity of COVID-19, or block infection by SARS-CoV-2. Barney is a vaccinologist and deputy director at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He was also speaker and member of the scientific advisory committee at ReSViNET’s past meeting in Accra, Ghana. In January, Graham and his colleagues were just about to start manufacturing the Nipah vaccine for human trials when they got wind of a disease caused by a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. They quickly changed their plans and swapped in the SARS-CoV-2 RNA instead. Clinical tests followed quickly and took just six weeks. In a phase I safety trial, Graham’s mRNA vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 was well tolerated by people, and a phase II study has begun to determine the dose required. A phase III trial designed to assess the vaccine’s efficacy is scheduled to start this month.

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