HOUSTON — A low-cost vaccine that was created in Texas could be a big step toward slowing the global spread of COVID-19.
Scientists created the CORBEVAXTM vaccine at Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Officials in India recently gave it emergency use authorization. Developers report that it is easier to distribute in low- and middle-income countries.
Dr. Peter Hotez, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, helped develop the vaccine. He said he believes it could make a worldwide impact.
"As long as we leave the southern hemisphere unvaccinated, new variants of concerns will emerge, and the only way to stop it is to vaccinate the world. And we think ours is going to be a major contributor to that,” Hotez said.
Once the vaccine rolls out in India, it's expected to become available in other under-served countries as well.
Known to some as "The World's Vaccine," CORBEVAXTM uses a traditional recombinant protein-based technology that enables large-scale production, making it widely accessible for inoculations across the globe.
"Protein-based vaccines have been widely used to prevent many other diseases, have proven safety records, and use economies of scale to achieve low-cost scalability across the world," said Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, professor and associate dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. "Our decade-long studies advancing coronavirus vaccine prototypes has led to the creation of this vaccine, which will fill the access gap created by the more expensive, newer vaccine technologies and that today are still not able to be quickly scaled for global production."
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