There are many pharmaceutical giants racing to produce a drug that will not only solve the world's misery, but also make them rich. But if scientists at a prestigious Chinese university are to be believed, we will not need a treatment to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Scientists in a Chinese laboratory have been painstakingly developing a vaccine they believe has the capability to stop the spread of the highly contagious disease.
The outbreak was first reported to have emerged in Wuhan, China late in 2019 before it made its way across the globe, prompting medical authorities worldwide to scramble to find a drug to combat the disease.
A vaccine being tested by doctors at China's renowned Peking University could not only cut the recovery time for sick patients, but even provide short-term immunity from Covid-19, scientists disclosed.
Sunney Xie, director of the Peking University's Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics revealed that the vaccine has been very effective during animal trials, AFP reported.
The AFP report added that, according to Xie, when scientists administered neutralizing antibodies into infected mice, "after five days the viral load was reduced by a factor of 2,500, meaning the drug has a therapeutic effect."
The vaccine uses antibodies that are produced by the human immune system to keep the virus from infecting cells which Xie's research team isolated from the blood of 60 recovered patients.
The Chinese medical team's expertise lies in single-cell DNA architecture and they realized that the approach helped them discover the key neutralizing antibody. The research was published on Sunday in the scientific journal, Cell.
The vaccine is seen to reach the market later in the year and will help fight the dreaded winter outbreak of the disease which is currently wreaking havoc around the globe and sickened 4.8 million people, with over 315,000 killed.
China already has five potential drug for Covid-19 at the human trial phase, a medical authorities disclosed last week.
But the World Health Organization has cautioned that developing a drug could take around 12 to 18 months.
Health experts have also pointed to the potential health benefits of plasma -- a blood fluid -- from recovered patients who have developed antibodies that enabled their body's defences to attack the virus.
Meanwhile, there has been no reported new cases of coronavirus deaths in China, based on AP reports. The National Health Commission reported four new local cross-infections in the country's northeastern Jilin province, where a cluster of a yet to be determined origin has been found in recent days.
