Department of Pediatrics

Coronavirus Vaccines

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Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development (TCH-CVD) at Baylor College of Medicine is a product development partnership that has been developing vaccines to prevent neglected and emerging infections for the past 20 years. TCHCVD is the anchor for translational medicine in the Texas Medical Center.

The 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) first emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of December 2019. As of August 2022, COVID-19 is estimated to have caused nearly 600 million total infections and more than 6.4 million deaths worldwide. At the emergence of COVID-19, TCH-CVD, through a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) between 2011 and 2016, had already developed recombinant protein-based vaccines against two earlier coronaviruses, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. This extensive expertise was immediately used to develop a novel SARS-CoV-2 vaccine; safe, efficacious, and affordable for the bottom-billion of the world still struggling to secure vaccine access. 

Working with modest support from the NIH (R01AI098775) and primarily through philanthropic support, after numerous pre-clinical studies, and extensive clinical trials to demonstrate safety and efficacy, the TCH-CVD developed vaccine (Corbevax) received emergency use authorization in India in December 2021. By Q3 of 2022, in India, the vaccine had already been administered more than 70 million times to individuals more than 5 years old and is also now approved for use as a heterologous booster for those previously immunized with other vaccines. 

In addition, the COVID-19 recombinant protein vaccine developed at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development has now also been licensed to, among others, partners in Indonesia and Botswana.

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CoV RBD219-N1 Vaccine

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Beginning in 2011, we embarked on efforts to develop coronavirus vaccines becoming one of the first groups to recognize the pandemic threats caused by coronaviruses. We teamed with a leading coronavirus research group at the New York Blood Center (Jiang/Du Lab) and at the University of Texas Medical Branch (Tseng Lab) to develop two recombinant subunit vaccines for the coronaviruses that caused both SARS and MERS outbreaks. The subunit vaccine for SARS, the SARS-CoV RBD219-N1 vaccine candidate, was technology transferred to WRAIR for manufacturing under cGMP and a batch of clinical-grade drug substance was generated. The vaccine remains under investigation at TCH-CVD as a possible component of a multivalent pan-coronavirus vaccine.