South Africa: Scientists are using reverse engineering technique to replicate Moderna vaccine

Johannesburg, South Africa

In a bid to end vaccine inequity, South African scientists are trying to replicate Moderna vaccine by using reverse engineering techniques.

For this purpose, warehouses in Cape Town have been converted into a maze of airlocked sterile rooms.

After receiving support from the World Health Organization, researchers are assembling and calibrating the equipment needed to reverse engineer a coronavirus vaccine that has yet to reach South Africa and most of the world's poorest people.

Also read | Those vaccinated last year with Moderna are twice likely to contract Covid: Study

The UN health agency is coordinating the vaccine research, training, and production hub in South Africa along with a related supply chain for critical raw materials.

According to Caryn Fenner, Afrigen Technical Director, "We've chosen the Moderna as the gold standard because it comes out of pre-clinical data where the various vaccines were compared head to head and that data is showing that Moderna is actually more favourable at this stage.''

 ''Also, the Moderna vaccine is cold storage which is less difficult at minus 20 degrees.''

Also read | Moderna, racing for profits, keeps Covid vaccine out of reach of poor

Several African nations do not have the ability to transport vaccines at the low temperatures needed to keep them usable and part of his work is to find ways to do that.

Stressing on the importance of innovation, Afrigen scientist Emile Hendricks said, ''We have to make sure that we innovate so that we can get this vaccine to as many of the African citizens as we can.''

Considered as one of the last ways to redress the power imbalances of the pandemic, reverse engineering refers to the recreation of vaccines from fragments of publicly available information.

Many countries, including the US, have pledged to provide vaccines to poorer nations but so far only a small percentage of those pledges have made it to their destinations.

However, as per an analysis by the People's Vaccine Alliance, only 0.7 per cent of vaccines have been given by wealthy nations to low-income countries so far.