02/18/04

Southern Research Institute plans to begin animal trials next week for three SARS vaccines developed in a high-priority program by Canadian scientists.

Tom Voss, director of infectious disease research at the institute, said the trials will take about three months and be conducted on mice and ferrets at Southern Research's high-security lab in Birmingham's Medical District.

Southern Research is collaborating with Canadian scientists because they lack laboratories and expertise needed to test the vaccines. Southern Research operates a biological safety level-3 laboratory in Birmingham, and scientists there have been working since last year to find drugs and develop a vaccine to fight SARS.

Canada's researchers developed the three vaccines in a high-speed effort after an outbreak of severe acute respiratory virus in Toronto killed 44 people last year. The vaccines use different methods to stimulate immune responses. One uses an inactivated virus, another uses a weakened virus and a third uses proteins.

"We're going to see which approach works best," Voss said.

Canadian scientists hope to begin human trials next year, pending the outcome of animal trials.

Voss said the animal trials in Birmingham will provide a limited measure of how well the vaccines work. That's because scientists have been unable to find an animal that is sickened by the disease the way a human is, and that raises questions about whether there's something fundamentally different about how SARS affects animals.

Mice and ferrets do get infected by SARS, but it doesn't appear to hit them as hard as it does people, he said.

"We still don't have a fatal infection in an animal," Voss said. "They do recover."

The entry of Southern Research into Canada's high-powered vaccine program is the result of the institute's prominence in SARS research. It started last year when the nonprofit center converted its high-capacity lab to quickly screen thousands of chemical compounds for possible development into drugs that could be used against SARS.

Voss said Southern Research scientists found several compounds that appear to be good candidates for development into SARS drugs. Results of the screening tests are being sent to pharmaceutical companies that hold legal rights to develop the compounds, he said.

Voss said Southern Research has also gained a reputation for its ability to replicate the SARS virus. Using cultures, Voss and other lab workers have been able to harvest hundreds to thousands times more SARS viruses than any other research center in the world.

"It's just a feel that you get on how to harvest the virus," Voss said.

More than 8,000 people were infected in last year's SARS outbreak, and 774 died.