The race for Israel's homegrown COVID-19 vaccine

• Published date: 30 September 2021
• Author: MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, the father of Israel's BriLife coronavirus vaccine, Prof. Shmuel Shapira, predicted that when the country's vaccine is ready, "it will be better" than what its citizens have today.

BriLife was developed by the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR). Shapira served as its director for the last eight years, stepping down in May. He recently published a book in Hebrew on his experience last year called The Pandemic Circus about Israel's race for its own antidote to the global pandemic.

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On a cold Saturday night on February 1, 2020, Shapira was watching a movie with his wife when his phone started ringing and an "unknown caller" appeared on the screen. At first he ignored the buzz, but after four or five attempts, he answered.

"I was asked to come to a meeting on Sunday at noon with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the possibility of manufacturing vaccines at IIBR," Shapira recalled.

"The request was rational," he said. "We were the only institute capable of planning and manufacturing vaccines. We were already doing it."

What exactly IIBR was working on is information that Shapira is not quick to share. The institute operates under the auspices of the Prime Minister's Office and works closely with the Defense Ministry. Its strategic and technical capabilities are shrouded in secrecy.

"We manufactured the smallpox vaccination for the entire population of Israel," Shapira said. "There were other vaccines as well, but I cannot say what they were."

"We opted for an approach that is, on the one hand, modern and, on the other, more conservative and less bold than the other vaccine makers chose," Shapira said, explaining that BriLife is based on a technology that has been in existence for three or four years and has already proven to be successful against the deadly Ebola virus.

BriLife is a vector-based vaccine. The vaccine takes the vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) and genetically engineers it so that it will express the spike protein of the novel coronavirus on its envelope.

Once injected, it does not cause disease by itself. Instead, the body recognizes the spike protein that is expressed on the envelope and begins to develop an immunological response. Moreover, unlike other vaccines, this one binds to the exact cell in the lung that is targeted by the novel coronavirus.

The last volunteer in Israel's Phase II clinical trial was inoculated earlier this month. The first volunteer in a Phase IIb trial in Georgia is expected to get jabbed at the start of November, NRx chairman Prof. Jonathan Javitt said. The Phase III trial should start by February.

IIBR gave NRx exclusive worldwide development, manufacturing and marketing rights for BriLife in July after more than three months of negotiations and a year of bureaucratic delays.

Javitt said that the Phase III trial will involve 20,000 people and last about six months, but "if the vaccine performs the way we hope it will against some of the new variants, I can imagine some countries thinking about giving it emergency use authorization in a third of that time."

NRx brought in outside experts to evaluate BriLife before signing...