Facing the relentless spread of the novel coronavirus, scientists around the world are racing to come up with a vaccine and drugs to thwart it and the COVID-19 illness that it causes. Armed with the genetic sequence of the virus, researchers at American biotechnology companies are deploying cutting-edge science to try to shorten the vaccine development timeline. Others are testing therapeutic drugs in clinical trials to see if they are safe and effective. Bill Whitaker talks to some of the companies at the forefront of this urgent effort and visits a biocontainment facility where some patients have been treated with an experimental drug on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, March 22 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
Whitaker speaks with the doctor running the biocontainment unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, one of the few sites around the country designed to handle patients with highly contagious and dangerous diseases. The National Institutes of Health chose Nebraska to launch the first U.S. clinical trial of an antiviral drug to treat COVID-19. Called remdesivir, it was developed originally for the Ebola virus. “Didn’t work as well for Ebola,” says Dr. Angela Hewlett, the medical director of the unit. “However, there have been some animal studies as well as some studies in the lab that demonstrate that it worked fairly well against illnesses like SARS and MERS, which are also coronaviruses.”
Vaccines usually take years to design and develop, but Whitaker reports new technology could speed up the process. Moderna, a small biotechnology company based in the Boston area, collaborated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to produce a vaccine that just started human testing. Moderna president Dr. Stephen Hoge tells Whitaker, “The technology we’re using… allows us to move incredibly quickly when we have a pandemic situation like the one we’re in.”
Whitaker also visits the labs of vaccine maker Inovio Pharmaceuticals in San Diego. Neither Inovio nor Moderna has ever brought a vaccine to market, but Kate Broderick, the senior vice president of Research and Development at Inovio, is cautiously optimistic. She tells Whitaker, “I can’t express to you the pressure that I personally feel under, and I think the whole scientific community feels under. There’s a great deal of responsibility in working towards a solution for this outbreak, literally as it’s happening.”
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