WRAL Special: Our Best Shot

mhm

Health officials are working to pinpoint the source of the

virus Ground zero A market in Wuhan

The new coronavirus is rapid rise in china in december

2019 got the attention of Duke researchers

I think it caught us all by surprise just how

fast everything went down

Duke Human vaccine institute quickly shifted gears helping develop covid

testing and setting up clinical trials for new vaccines were

uniquely placed to be able to respond to pandemics

And it's already working on a new vaccine to help

prevent future pandemics

That's a vaccine that would hopefully have some efficacy against

the next coronavirus outbreak

The speed at which the current vaccines were made have

some reluctant to take them about a quarter of eligible

americans still haven't gotten their first shot

It is very frustrating because I just don't understand the

arguments against taking the vaccine a vaccine that wasn't really

made in a matter of months

The work has actually been going on for many many

years giving us all our best shot at ending the

pandemic

hospitals in Wuhan under resourced and overwhelmed people anxious about

the mysterious virus that has triggered extraordinary measures across china

to contain it

As the new virus spread across china in late 2019

In early 2020 researchers at Duke University's human vaccine institute

were paying attention

The coronavirus wasn't really a focus of what we were

doing here

So we all had to get up to speed very

very quickly

There were a lot of papers that were reading a

lot of conversations that were had

But honestly the moment that we do it was going

to be an issue

We also knew that we were a group that was

really poised to do something about the antibodies are able

to

The institute is a collection of laboratories employing nearly 200

researchers

We work both on vaccines as well as just basic

biology to try to understand how infection occurs and then

how the body fights it off

And by understanding how that basic mechanism works we can

then design countermeasures be at antibodies or vaccines that can

employ those same types of mechanisms

At first Duke researchers thought the new virus might be

like the first SARS outbreak of 20 years ago that

virus was less transmissible

So easier to isolate

That wasn't the case with this new coronavirus dubbed SARS

Kobe to authorities confirmed the virus can be transmitted from

human to human through coughing sneezing or other personal contact

And so it quickly became evident that that type of

virus was going to be a lot harder to stop

The vaccine was really going to be necessary early on

the virus quickly spread across the country and hospital intensive

care unit started filling up with patients including ones here

in north Carolina

There was a huge amount of research that had already

been done on coronavirus is because of the SARS and

MERS outbreaks that had already happened

So really a lot of the basic research that would

have been needed to figure out like how do you

even make a vaccine against the coronavirus that had already

been done

The federal government was already working with pharmaceutical companies on

vaccines

So the institute looked ahead

It's suspected that the new SARS Kobe two virus would

mutate

So what we decided to do was to not compete

with what was just starting but to look ahead to

making vaccines that might be used for boosters and might

be used against mutants that would mutate away from the

current uh current vaccines that were being made

The institute collected antibodies from infected people to begin that

work

It also helped with clinical trials for the new vaccines

and treatments being developed

We have a clinical trials unit within the institute that

really became instrumental in some of the early trials to

test different interventions to see if they were able to

stop the Covid 19 disease

And we also had a group here that really kicked

into high gear and started doing testing

And so testing became one of the major roles that

we served

Researchers think this trial could lead to an emergency FDA

vaccine approval by september will take longer to ramp up

production and rollout when vaccines did roll out in january

2021 My wife and I got ours as soon as

we could have you tested positive for COVID-19 have been

instructed to isolate in last 10 days

I have not

We were both 65 and had underlying health conditions have

65 going to be 66 in August

So we're trying to encourage folks to take the shot

I got my first shot January 15 at the Cumberland

County Health Department's drive through clinic at the Crown Coliseum

She's giving me the shot right now

Um I don't even feel the needle at all

We received our second shots on february 10

No la that pops the first time

No longer pops the second time

But hey it's official got the second shot here in

august

I had 10 people at my house to celebrate my

birthday

Everyone said they were vaccinated but six of us got

breakthrough infections including my wife and me

We took every precaution delta variant does not care

My wife and four others were able to recover at

home

I unfortunately did not fare as well

Now I'm stable because I'm just sitting here

But if I get up and move around I started

having a coughing fits and breathing difficulties

I spent nine days in the hospital but recovered thanks

to being vaccinated

Researchers say no vaccine is 100% effective and breakthrough infections

like mine should not discourage people from getting them all

The data is showing that those who have been vaccinated

that get infected have a much milder course of the

disease and do not end up in the intensive care

units or dying from severe infection and the complications of

that

Researchers say people should not be worried by the speed

with which the new COVID-19 vaccines were developed and distributed

Either they say the infrastructure for clinical trials and manufacturing

was already in place

They didn't cut out any of the steps

They just cut out a lot of the red tape

and delays

Early research on HIV also helped the work has actually

been going on for many many years and we're fortunate

that the technology was there at the time

The pandemic struck so that these new vaccines could be

brought to the public quickly

Haynes remembers his own experience as a child in the

age of polio were all very frightened to go anywhere

and to be around other Children because of the fear

of getting polio and becoming paralyzed as I remember it

was not too different from the last year and a

half with regard to restricting our activity back in the

fifties

Then polio vaccines were developed and the rates of polio

transmission plummeted and society went back to normal

That's a terrific example of just how effective Vaccines can

be

Uh to get back to normalcy and to stop a

pandemic and its tracks

That's what we're trying to do now with the coronavirus

next

The decades of research behind the current COVID vaccines about

25 vaccines to combat the AIDS virus are currently under

study

So now we're into a look inside the institute's super

secure lab

It's an extremely safe and secure facility for working with

the live authentic coronavirus

Yeah The World Health Organization estimates up to 100,000 AIDS

cases today

Duke human vaccine Institute Director Barton Haynes began studying what

was called gay related immune deficiency disease for the NIH

In 1983 we were very very concerned at the mortality

rate and the rate of spread of this particular virus

We didn't know it was a virus at that time

we didn't know what it was

The probable cause of AIDS has been found variant of

a known human cancer virus

Haynes studied hemophiliacs who were becoming infected with what became

known as HIV the infection of the human felax

Let us know that this was a virus that could

infect anyone in the population

In 1985 Haynes started working on an HIV vaccine

Among his colleagues was the federal government's leading AIDS researcher

at the time Anthony Fauci

If we're lucky and we do develop the vaccine it'll

be well into the mid nineties that we have one

available

Haynes says different research grants were going to different researchers

all over the world

We were stuck we had About 50 different vaccine candidates

Many of them were similar because they were not being

compared with each other and none that frankly I or

anyone else was really excited about Haines collaborated with the

federal government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to

do business in a different way and the new business

a different way was to fund groups of individuals who

would compare the different vaccine candidates and agreed to work

together

In 2000 and five the federal government granted the institute

$300 million to develop an AIDS vaccine

So what changed in 2000 and five was that the

field began the process of coming together and collaborating in

larger and larger groups

HIV is a more challenging virus than SARS Kobe too

It's one of the most rapidly evolving life forms in

the virus world

When it inserts into our own genetic material It cloaks

itself it hides from the immune system and our body

doesn't naturally make the antibodies needed to fight it

So what we're having to do with HIV and what

we spent the last 17 years learning is how do

you engineer the human immune system so that will safely

make those protective antibodies that when they're made they don't

harm us

So we know what we need to do

We know what the vaccine is going to have to

do

And now it's just a matter of actually putting the

plans in place to get that actual vaccine made work

on HIV helped lead to the development of what's called

M

RNA technology for the development of vaccines

It's the same technology used to make the current covid

vaccines typically vaccines are either virus particles that have been

inactivated so that they're not infectious or their protein parts

of the virus that your body sees as foreign and

makes an immune response and establishes memory the MRNA Platform

uses the coding sequence that tells your body how to

make proteins

We can quickly give that to a person and you

use your human body as the actually the manufacturing facility

to make the proteins and then your body sees those

proteins as foreign and makes the memory immune response which

gives you the protection and the beauty of the M

RNA platform is it's one that is a very short

timeline going from vaccine candidate development going to manufacturing because

of just the nature of the way the M

RNA product is made

The technology can be used to make both vaccines and

treatments and it's flexible

You can quickly modify what goes into the vaccine so

that you can pivot to vary new variants that come

out or take that same concept and apply it to

another pathogen that may come down the road

The institute's work on HIV vaccine also meant There was

already a clinical trial network in place to test vaccines

for COVID-19 And so they were able to pivot very

quickly because they already had people in place

They already had all of the staff that was necessary

to do it just had to turn their attention to

a different problem

The work that's been going on for the past 20

years or so

And HIV vaccine development developed much of the technology that

was then taken and frame shifted and used immediately in

January of 2020 for the covid vaccines

Haynes says that's one reason those vaccines were developed so

quickly

People have been trying to make better vaccines for years

for a number of different diseases and all of those

techniques were brought to bear on this problem

The institute is currently using antibodies it collected from people

infected with SARS Kobe to to develop what's called a

pan coronavirus vaccine

When we say pan coronavirus we actually mean many different

types of coronavirus is both in humans and both Annapolis

If we can get a pan coronavirus vaccine hopefully the

goal would be you would not have to worry about

variants

The institute is working on a similar vaccine for the

flu

So the goal there is hopefully to get a vaccine

for influenza that you do not have to take every

year

So the virology teams that we've put together here the

immunology teams that we put together here to study HIV

and other pathogens over the years were able to rapidly

frame shift into flu

Now at the heart of the institute is the Duke

regional biocontainment laboratory

This is a highly secured facility is where you have

researchers working with live viruses to develop vaccines

Duke is giving us a rare look inside

It allows us to do laboratory and animal studies so

that we can help develop the next generation of vaccines

and treatments to deal with these global pandemic threats

So Gilbert we're going to head into the containment side

of the facility

Now this is a hallway that has eight individual biocontainment

suites that allow us the ability to have multiple research

projects going on at one time with different agents

Most of the rooms right now are dedicated to SARS

coronavirus two

And having the regional biocontainment facility is sort of a

jewel within our total program for doing that because we

do have the ability to bring samples in from outbreak

situations be able to safely and securely work with them

here at Duke and then to use the information we

learn from those samples to design the vaccines are the

therapeutics that will help us to combat that outbreak

What do you tell someone who is reluctant to get

the vaccine Well it's unfortunate that politics and other opinions

are coming into play here

It is a very safe very effective vaccine

Both Moderna Pfizer J and J

This is something that everyone needs to take to protect

themselves their family and the community at large

This lab is also capable of manufacturing vaccines and treatments

all within the vaccine institute here at Duke

We can go from basic discovery all the right of

the first in human testing which is quite unique

Very few institutions have their own pilot manufacturing facility

Next what Duke researchers learned from this pandemic that will

help them prepare for the next one

Be prepared constantly

And what I learned from my own battle with COVID-19

God is good

So is that dog on vaccine

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Yeah average new infections dropping and hospitalizations declining as the

pandemic appears to be winding down

Researchers at the Duke Human vaccine Institute are once again

looking ahead

We're preparing for future pandemics because it's inevitable that they're

coming

The institute is looking at vaccines to fight viruses currently

in animals that might someday jump to humans and go

ahead and make those vaccines and put them on the

shelf test them in humans and safety trials and have

them ready to go when a new pandemic strikes so

we can respond even faster

The other component of being prepared is developing a series

of antibodies that you can use as treatments

The idea is to use antibodies to blunt early infection

So it doesn't lead to severe disease to have those

antibodies on the shelf for whole panel of viruses

Uh so that we'll be ready

Yeah let's see how this one looks like dealing with

this pandemic has been a learning experience for the institute's

researchers

And so we've been able to kind of come up

with a plan for the future

So that when the next pandemic or the next outbreak

that comes around we'll be prepared to be able to

respond as fast as possible And researchers here also hope

the pandemic has taught people about how scientific research evolves

We learn things and we figure out what's right and

what's wrong and then we move and we continue that

process forever

It never stops

And so a lot of times I think people go

well why are you changing your answer Well that's because

I know more now

I gave an answer before based on the best data

available

Now

I have better data so I can give you a

better answer and it's important to understand that we know

what we know now and we will know more tomorrow

The institute's technology and experienced staff provide a great learning

environment for young researchers like Maria Blasi

That is actually one of the things that really attracted

me to come here and stay here and attracting researchers

like Blasi is critical to the institute's future

I think there is a lot of investment from everyone

in this institute on training the next generation of scientists

So being able to provide like young investigator with technologies

and resources to be able to foster their career is

crucial

I think for any institution and I think we do

have all of that here

The vaccine institute

The pandemic was not only a learning experience for the

Duke human vaccine institute it was also a learning experience

for me

I covered Covid 19 as a reporter and battled it

as a patient here at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center

I hadn't eaten in three days

I've lost £15 and I'm living what we've been reporting

for the past 18 months

And it gives me a different perspective and reporting the

story going forward

I was diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia

No way Tylenol was gonna take care of that at

the house

It took me in and give me antibiotics gave me

medicine for my nauseous feeling

I'm on an isolated mm covid board here at the

hospital

I saw the patients up and down the hall in

the ICU is overwhelming to see all the people who

are here fighting for their lives

I'm the only one that had shots

I'm the only one without oxygen or a ventilator

But that God I had the vaccine to keep me

fighting at the level that I'm fighting now in comparison

to my colleagues

So I was looking forward to

After nine days in the hospital I went home to

continue my recovery

Wow my friend dan fresh air

Unbelievable one doctor told me that with my age and

diabetes this day may have never come without me being

vaccinated

I shared my story on social media and on the

news in hopes of inspiring others to get the vaccine

Gilbert is back on the job today

The first day Since recovering from COVID

The experience gave me a much broader understanding of COVID-19

and its impacts

I now know firsthand what researchers have been telling us

all along that vaccines are a best shot at the

feeding pandemics

Love you

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Mm