Molecular biologists and OCTA Research fellow Fr. Nicanor Austriaco hopes that the oral vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that his team is currently developing will be manufactured in the Philippines.
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“I would like to do everything in the Philippines. I would like this to be a Filipino vaccine for the Filipinos,” Austriaco said in an interview over DZBB Thursday, April 29.
He hopes that the Philippines will be a vaccine independent country in the next 10 years.
“The yeast-based oral vaccine could be scaled up and manufactured in the Philippines by our pharmaceutical companies. It can be mass produced in the Philippines so we would be able to be independent of the global supply, which is why we are struggling today,” he said.
“So my hope and my dream is we would become a vaccine independent country in the next 10 years,” he added
Along with his two students, Austriaco is currently developing two vaccines against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and new virus variants causing COVID-19.
He said the vaccine they are developing is cheaper and will be shelf-stable for two years at room temperature, meaning it does not need refrigeration.
“What we did here for the last few months is we took this probiotic yeast, which is already approve for human consumption, but we took it and we genetically engineered it so it will produce a fragment of the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2,” he said.
“Instead of being injected you will just take the oral vaccine. The one we’re developing here is an oral vaccine hopefully to prevent you from getting COVID,” he added.
Austriaco is a molecular biologist from the Providence College in Rhode Island, United States working on yeast for 25 years and a visiting professor of Biological Sciences at the University of the Santo Tomas in Manila.
“We are designing this as a second generation vaccine because we will have to be vaccinated against COVID-19 every year,” he explained.
“So the government has already bought the vaccine for this year, and I am hoping that this vaccine that we are developing will be successful next year for all our kababayans,” he added.
Austriatico is set to return in the country next week to test the yeast they have developed on animals in UST.
“We have the yeast already and the yeast has been changed so it can make the spike protein, and we have to test to see if that when we put it in mice whether or not they will develop and immunity against COVID,” he said.
“So you have to test it in mice before your can test it with people. There are very few oral vaccines so we will have to test it in animals first,” he added.