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April 28, 2003

INTERNATIONAL IMMUNIZATION NEWS

"Vaccine or a Cure for Disease Likely to Take Years to Find"

Financial Times (www.ft.com) (04/26/03) P. 10; Cookson, Clive

The quick decoding of the genome for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was an unprecedented feat for geneticists and microbiologists, but the knowledge may not translate into anything of tangible benefit to the general public for years.  Of particular concern is that SARS is an RNA virus, which means it mutates more quickly than other viruses, a phenomenon already noted by Chinese scientists who have reported substantial variations in the SARS genome among various patients.   As a result,  vaccine developers will have a much more difficult time in creating a vaccine against the disease, with experts recently suggesting that a vaccine could be seven years away if researchers are fortunate, with 12 years a more likely figure.  For those concerned about the power of the illness, virologist Ian Jones of Reading University notes that "the vast majority of mutations will make the virus less fit.  I do not think that it is going to become more pathogenic or that the nature of the disease will change.  Most viruses prefer a particular host cell type as the site of infection and this is unlikely to change."

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