Production, deployment among challenges when COVID-19 vaccine ready

Dr. Mark Poznansky, Director of the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital joins Yahoo Finance's On the Move to talk about the challenges that lie ahead for COVID-19 vaccines in development. He also talks about his work with HaloVax to develop a self-assembling vaccine to protect patients at risk of COVID-19 infections.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases yesterday. They talked about a wide range of issues. Zuckerberg said that he thinks the US has made some missteps on its attempt to fight coronavirus. And Fauci talked about the quest for a vaccine.

ANTHONY FAUCI: We should know, as we get into the mid to late fall, early winter, but probably late fall, whether we have candidates that really are safe and effective. And I hope and anticipate that we will have one or more. If that's the case, by the time we get to the end of this year, the beginning of calendar year 2021, we may have vaccine, one or more candidate, that is actually safe and effective.

JULIE HYMAN: To talk more about this, let's bring in Dr. Mark Poznansky. He's Director of the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. He's joining us from Boston. He is also working with a company called HaloVax on developing a vaccine.

Dr. Poznansky, thank you for being here. There was a recent article shared by the American Council on Science and Health that looked at the success rate of various types of drugs once they go through clinical trials. And they found for vaccines that there was about a 33% success rate of various drugs that were approved after going through the process.

So do you agree-- I mean, what's your optimism level? Obviously, you're working on one yourself. But do you think that there is a high likelihood that we will get some-- a vaccine that's highly effective by the end of the year or going into next year?

MARK POZNANSKY: Well, I think the key thing is that Dr. Fauci has privileged information beyond what I can read. But I would say that if he's optimistic, then he's-- he's a great speaker of truth on the issue of the science. And vaccine development, I would say that he has a good view on being optimistic.

And I would say that given the success rates of vaccines as a-- there's that type of chance that we do have a safe and effective vaccine by the timeline that he talked about. However, there's always the caution because of the fact that we're developing a vaccine for a virus that we don't fully understand the immune response to and what we need to create in terms of that immune response to protect individuals from the disease.

And I think the other important point is protect those individuals who are at most risk for the serious components of the-- you know, the serious consequence of the disease. And I think that vaccines will be tested in young people, obviously, and that makes a lot of sense with regards to their safety profile and efficacy. But in the end, we'll want to see the efficacy of those in people who are 60 and above or people who have pre-existing conditions, and that's a more complicated story, which may not be settled science in the beginning of 2021.

And I think we just have to be always informed by data and science, as opposed to opinion and anecdote. And I think that Dr. Fauci would agree that in the end, we'll be sitting here in 2021 with a lot of data, and we'll be able to state is this safe and efficacious? And if it is efficacious, is it going to be effective in those people what would be otherwise most affected by the serious consequences of the virus?

And I'd just go on to say, you know, one element of the whole vaccine development, which I know is something that people are more increasingly aware of, is the diverse immune response that you may need to protect you, not just antibodies, but also these sort of T cell responses. And that's where HaloVax comes in, because our vaccine platform is a second-generation approach, first generation trying to get the antibodies, second generation getting a more balanced B cell, T cell, antibody T cell type of response. And we think that it's important to have those second-generation vaccines like HaloVax in development just in case that we're in 2021 in the beginning and we say, it might be safe, but it may not be effective enough, these first generations, and we do need a second generation in place to address that. And that wouldn't be a surprise, in many ways.

- So it sounds like we still have a long way to go. I mean, you know, my question is, even after there is a vaccine that's developed, how quickly can that scale up? You know, we've had a number of companies on that have said that they have already started to build out in anticipation of a quick scale-up. One, in fact, that vaccine is available. But how have you seen that expand over the last several months?

MARK POZNANSKY: Well, I think-- I think we've-- we've learned a great lesson from-- from the whole testing realm. So we've scaled up testing, but you can see how long that took, and it's still taking time to scale up testing across the nation. So what I'm saying is you can develop a safe and effective vaccine, and you can produce it in large quantities, just like tests are now being produced in large quantities, but its deployment across the nation is another huge challenge.

I'm not an expert in vaccine deployment, but there are many people across the globe who are, and they would always recognize the challenge of having developed large quantities of the vaccine, how do you actually administer it safely and effectively across a whole nation to millions of people? You may have millions of doses of a vaccine sitting in a refrigerator somewhere, but how do you get it to all the other refrigerators all over the country and then get people to come up and get their vaccine? So that's another very significant challenge. And we've seen it, as I've said, in testing. We now have lots of testing kits, lots of tests out there, but there's still an issue of deployment across the nation at a level that covers the nation effectively week on, week out in every place across the country.

JULIE HYMAN: And Dr. Poznansky, finally, you mentioned that the vaccine you're working on should, in theory, be more efficacious than a first generation. What is more efficacious mean? What-- what's a target efficacy that you want to see for your vaccine? But not only that, what's sort of the minimum efficacy that any vaccine should have in order to come to public and be-- be administered to people?

MARK POZNANSKY: Well, that's a great question, because you know, what does a vaccine target? In the first, you could say the first realm of that is that the vaccine helps to modify the disease, so severe disease becomes moderate disease, moderate disease becomes mild disease, mild disease ends up with you not even knowing that you had the disease. So you can imagine that being a game changer for people with severe and moderate disease that now that is reduced in its frequency.

And so people, if they get the disease, are either asymptomatic or they have a mild disease. A vaccine could actually affect that change, and that would be a significant benchmark. The next level is obviously that you vaccinate people, and they don't get the disease. They're either completely asymptomatic. They might have a few minor side effects of the vaccine itself. But otherwise, they wouldn't have even known that they got the disease.

And I think if these two elements of how vaccines are targeted are very relevant if in the first generation you have a vaccine that maybe just modifies the severity of the disease, that would be a significant effect in its own right. And it would have to do that-- I think it comes back to the first point. It would have to do that in the population of people over 60 or those people with other illnesses where they are at increased risk of severe disease, and now the vaccine takes away that risk. That would be a significant impact of a vaccine in the first generation.

JULIE HYMAN: Right.

MARK POZNANSKY: What HaloVax would want to do is obviously prevent the disease altogether and give you a good memory response that is long and extends over several years. I mean, that's the sort of dream vaccine that you have it a couple of times, and then you know you're protected for five to 10 years. That's what we're aiming for in HaloVax.

JULIE HYMAN: Well, we wish you luck in those efforts and all the other folks who are trying to work on these vaccines. Dr. Mark Poznansky is Director of the Vaccine Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

MARK POZNANSKY: Thank you very much, indeed.