Coronavirus vaccine: Latest developments in race to beat the virus

The race to develop a vaccine for coronavirus has picked up speed with scientists from all across the world trying their luck in beating the virus. Russia said on Wednesday it will take between eight and 10 months to develop a vaccine against coronavirus, the Interfax news agency cited health minister Mikhail Murashko as saying. While another scientist claimed to have made a "breakthrough" in the development.

"Today the process of developing a vaccine is not a short period of time. A vaccine is being developed for at least eight to 10 months, this is just the initial stage without clinical trials," said Murashko.

A leading British scientist, on the other hand, has made a significant breakthrough in the race for a coronavirus vaccine by reducing a part of the normal development time from "two to three years to just 14 days", Sky News reported. Robin Shattock, Head of mucosal infection and immunity at Imperial College London, said he is now at the stage to start testing the vaccine on animals as early as next week with human studies in the summer if enough funding is secured, Sky said.

"Conventional approaches usually take at least two to three years before you even get to the clinic," he told Sky. "And we've gone from that sequence to generating a candidate in the laboratory in 14 days." The vaccine will be too late for this current outbreak but it will be crucial if there is another one, Sky said.

Doctors looking for ways to treat patients infected with the new coronavirus are likely to try antiviral medicines licensed for use against other viral infections to see if they might help, as well as potential antiviral drugs still in development. The U.S. drugmaker Gilead says it has started clinical trials of patients in China infected with the new coronavirus, using an experimental drug called remdesivir, but stressed that this work is investigational at this stage.

"It is not approved anywhere globally," a Gilead spokesman told Reuters in Beijing. Gilead said it had increased the manufacturing of remdesivir to create a stockpile that might be used in future viral disease outbreaks. "We are doing this before knowing whether the drug is safe and effective to treat 2019-nCoV," the spokesman said.