On April 11, 1970, at 19:13 GMT, Apollo 13 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Atop the giant Saturn V booster sat Command Module 109 and Service Module 109, which together formed CSM-109 (otherwise known as Odyssey), and the lunar module (LM) Aquarius.

In the couches of the command module were mission commander James A. Lovell, Jr., age 42, a US Navy captain on his third space mission and his second visit to the Moon. Next to him was command module pilot John L. "Jack" Swigert, Jr., 38, a space rookie who was a last-minute replacement for astronaut Ken Mattingly, who was scrubbed after being exposed to the measles. On the other side of Lovell was lunar module pilot Fred W. Haise, Jr., 35, on his first and only spaceflight.

This was to be the most ambitious Apollo mission to date. Building on the lessons learned from Apollo 12, it was to make a precise landing on the Moon in the highlands of the Fra Mauro region, farther north from the equator than Apollo 11 or 12, meaning that both the Saturn V booster and the lunar module carried more fuel than any other mission.

But another thing that marked the mission was a sense of complacency, even apathy. If the Apollo missions now seemed routine to the men and women of NASA, the public was downright indifferent. They'd been sold Apollo as a great adventure and they were getting bored with the repeats of the same plot. It was a sentiment shared by the US Congress. NASA's budget had been going down ever since the main work on Apollo was completed in 1964, but now Apollo 20 was canceled and the trimming looked set to go much deeper.A bomb aboardThis complacency wouldn't have lasted long if NASA knew Apollo 13 had a bomb on board. It wasn't the work of terrorists or enemy saboteurs but the result of the kind of oversight that can occur in any super-complex endeavor. In fact, it was a credit to NASA that such errors didn't happen more often. However, this time, the oversight was nearly fatal.

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Behind the conical command module that acted as a home for the Apollo astronauts is the service module. This cylindrical assembly with a bell-like cone at one end contained the main engine and supplied Odyssey with oxygen, water, electricity, and long-range communications with Earth.

Inside the service module was a bay holding a number of systems, including two liquid oxygen tanks that were the primary source of oxygen for the command module. Also in the bay were a tank of liquid hydrogen and three fuel cells. The hydrogen and oxygen feeding into the fuel cells provided Odyssey with power and water.

There was a history to one of these units. The No. 2 oxygen tank had been previously installed in the service module of Apollo 10 but was then taken out for modification, during which it was damaged and then sent back to the factory for repairs. It was then installed in the Apollo 13 service module.

Like all NASA flight gear, the No. 2 tank was tested and retested even after installation. On March 16, 1970, the tank suddenly developed a fault. It wouldn't drain properly. It was finally decided to run the tank's electrical heater to boil the oxygen. This didn't resolve the problem entirely, but because the oxygen tanks didn't need to drain in space and due to time constraints, No. 2 was cleared for flight.

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However, the heaters had been upgraded so that they could operate at 68 volts instead of the previous 28 volts, but the thermostatic switches that controlled the heaters weren't changed. As a result, during the final test, the switches welded shut and the wiring was frayed. Another problem was the use of aluminum components and Teflon insulation both of which burn in pure oxygen.

To put it more simply, No. 2 tank was now a bomb waiting to detonate.

There was no sign of any trouble as Apollo 13 lifted off from the pad. The weather was good and the only difference from previous Saturn V launches was that it cleared the tower a bit slower because of the extra fuel it carried. When the second stage fired, the center of the five engines started to go into severe pogo operations and shut down. The other four engines throttled up to compensate and Mission Control and the crew thought that the mission had passed its one major glitch.

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Once the S-IVB third stage separated and fired for the first time, Apollo 13 settled into an orbit 120 mi (193 km) above the Earth. Two hours later, the rocket fired its engine again and the astronauts were on their way to the Moon. The CSM Odyssey then separated from the S-IVB, Swigert turned the craft around, docked with the lunar module Aquarius and eased it out. With a slight course correction, Apollo 13 was on a trajectory to circle the Moon, while the S-IVB went on a collision course with the lunar surface where it would impact three days later an event that would be recorded by the seismograph left behind by Apollo 12.

It was all like a Space Age milk run.

Everything was relaxed for the first two days of the mission. At 55 hours into the flight, Lovell used the command module's television camera to provide the audience back on Earth with a tour of Odyssey and Aquarius. Unfortunately, since none of the US networks carried the broadcast, the audience was reduced to Mission Control and a few of the astronauts' relatives.

At hour 56, 210,000 mi (330,000 km) from Earth, after completing the broadcast, NASA gave the men a few minutes to recover before they went back to work, with Lovell stowing the camera and Haise testing and shutting down the lunar module's systems. Meanwhile, Swigert was carrying out routine maintenance tests on the service module's oxygen tanks to track down a sensor malfunction.

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Back at Mission Control in Houston, the Electrical, Environmental, and Communication officer (EECOM) Sy Liebergot asked Swigert to activate the fans to stir the liquid oxygen in No.2 tank, so it wouldn't settle into layers.

Then, 95 seconds later, things went wrong. There was a short circuit in the heater in tank No. 2, which started a fire. Pressure increased suddenly as the oxygen flashed into a gas, and the tank's structure gave way with explosive force.

Though an entire panel fore and aft on the service module was blasted away and there was extensive damage, the first clue the astronauts had that something was wrong was a loud bang. At the same time, telemetry with Earth went out for 1.8 seconds, the power readings on the instrument panel started fluctuating, and the spacecraft was jolting as the automatic pilot kept firing the attitude control thrusters to compensate against some unknown force.

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Twenty-six seconds after the bang, Swigert called back to mission control, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here."

Lovell then repeated and elaborated. "Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a Main B Bus undervolt."

The initial fear was that Odyssey or Aquarius had been hit by a meteorite and that one or both of the crew modules had been holed, but there was no evidence of a serious loss of pressure. The Main Bus B undervolt fault indicated that the service module's three fuel cells were malfunctioning. Then Bus A started losing power and two of the fuel cells were fading, with both dead in under half an hour.

The more Mission Control and the astronauts checked, the worse things looked. Oxygen tank No. 2 had zero pressure and No. 1 was leaking fast. Also, the computer had reset and was running a fault check, while the high gain antenna had switched to a secondary mode.

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Back on Earth, Liebergot couldn't believe what he was seeing on his panel. The service module was designed with multiple redundancies and constructed out of components that didn't need maintenance in flight, but he saw numerous systems failures of the sort that one only saw in simulators when the operator wanted to make sure the astronauts were paying attention.

At first, Liebergot thought that it had to be an instrument failure, but Lovell reported that he could see debris outside the ship and an expanding cloud of gas. It was this that was pushing on Odyssey and against which the autopilot was fighting. Worse, No. 1 tank was leaking fast and when it went, the service module would start sucking oxygen from the command module's tiny reserve surge tank.

Lead Flight Director Gene Kranz, who had such high authority at Mission Control that the only way to veto his decisions was to fire him, ordered the command module surge tank sealed off, but the rapidly depleted tank No. 1 would only keep the remaining fuel cell going for about two hours. After that, the only power would be from the command module batteries, which were only meant to last a few hours.

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It was obvious that the Odyssey was a dying ship and that the lunar landing was scrubbed. The most obvious next step was to preserve what was left in the command module's batteries by powering down its systems literally turning it off. This was something that had never been done on a mission before and the engineers weren't sure how to turn it back on again for the return to Earth. This raised two more obvious questions: How to get back to Earth and how to keep the three men alive during the trip.

The answer to the second question was to use the lunar module as a lifeboat a scenario that had already been considered as an emergency measure for Apollo 10, 11, and 12. It was possible. The LM was intact, had plenty of oxygen in its life support systems, engines, and spacesuit backpacks, but the LM was only designed to support two men for 45 hours. Now it had to keep three alive for four days.

One limiting factor was power. Instead of fuel cells, the LM used silver-oxide/zinc batteries with only 2,181 Ah capacity. Some of this was needed to keep the command module's batteries charged, so everything not absolutely essential on the LM was shut down and energy consumption kept below 20 percent.

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It would be a very cold, dark journey home.

Water was another problem. It was not only required to keep the astronauts alive, but it was also used to cool the LM's systems. The crew was rationed to six ounces (177 ml) each a day and instructed to only eat wet-packed foods. Even then, the spacecraft would run out of water five hours before reentry, but experience on Apollo 11 indicated that the LM could continue to function for that long without it.

Under normal circumstances, the way to get Apollo 13 back to Earth would have been using a direct abort trajectory, which would have involved firing the service module's main engine to place the spacecraft in a truncated orbit home. This would have been the fastest way, but Kranz vetoed this because no one knew how badly damaged the engine was.

The alternative was to carry on, loop around the Moon, and swing back to earth, using the attitude control rockets for any course corrections. Had this been one of the earlier Apollo missions, such a free return orbit would have needed little more than sitting back and letting gravity do the work.

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But that wasn't possible for Apollo 13 because its goal of landing in the lunar highlands put it in a hybrid orbit a variation of the free return orbit, except that it needed an engine burn to make actual reentry on reaching Earth. Otherwise, the craft would simply have swung back into deep space.

Since the service module was unavailable, this left the crew with only the less powerful descent stage engines on the LM. Before shutting down the command module, Lovell wrote down the guidance readouts regarding the spacecraft's orientation and did the calculations (without a calculator but with Mission Control checking his sums) needed to feed the data into the LM's guidance system. However, making the necessary maneuvers using the LM required both Lovell and Haise at the controls and a lot of learning by doing.

There was also the question of whether to jettison the service module. This would have meant less weight for the lunar module's engine to push and cut the return trip by 36 hours. Unfortunately, this would have meant exposing the Command Module's phenol resin heat shield to the cold of space and the engineers weren't sure what damage this would do, so the service module stayed.

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A 34-second burn with the LM's engine put the craft back on a free return trajectory but more burns would be needed if the command module was to land on Earth where it could be recovered safely. This meant one of three options: The Indian Ocean, where the US had few recovery units; the South Atlantic Ocean, where the same problem arose; and the South Pacific, where a recovery fleet was already steaming.

In the end, NASA opted to make another engine burn two hours after Apollo 13 passed its closest point to the Moon and 73 hours, 46 minutes into the flight. This would shorten the return by 12 hours and put the command module in the Pacific. This second four-minute burn was difficult enough, but with all the debris floating around it wasn't possible to orient the spacecraft using the stars, as was standard procedure, so the crew lined up using the Sun and the Moon again, using the LM's guidance system. This brought them to within a half a degree of the desired angle.

There was still much to do on the way back to Earth, but a more immediate problem was the men's own breath, which was pumping carbon dioxide into the confined space of the LM. At first, this wasn't a threat because there were lithium hydroxide canisters that scrubbed the CO2 from the air. However, these were meant for two men for 45 hours and within 36 hours after moving into the LM, the atmosphere warning light came on. The air in Aquarius was turning deadly and, if the problem wasn't solved, the crew would be dead a day before reaching Earth.

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In an ideal world, this would have been an easy fix. The command module also had scrubber canisters more than enough for the trip home. Why not just move them over and plug them in? The crew couldn't because the canisters aboard Aquarius were round and the ones from Odyssey were square. Like a bad joke, the round holes of Aquarius' life support system wouldn't accept Odyssey's square pegs.

Like those school exercises where students are given a bag of items and are told to build a crane or a hovercraft, NASA engineers had to as quickly as possible figure out how to build an adapter using materials known to be on the spacecraft, write up clear and detailed instructions on how to assemble it, and relay this to the astronauts.

According to Apollo astronaut Ken Mattingly, the solution was from a simulator exercise for training the Apollo 8 mission crew, where a similar emergency was solved by blowing air through a canister using the spacecraft's vacuum cleaner hose.

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They soon came up with a contraption called the "mailbox," which was made from plastic, covers from procedure manuals, vent hoses, and other bits and pieces, all held together with duct tape. Just reading the procedures over the radio took an hour.MiseryOnce the burns were completed, all but the most essential lunar module systems were shut down. This helped to conserve precious resources, but it also made the spacecraft a miserable place to be as both the command module and the LM went dark and dropped to the temperature of a refrigerator, reaching as low as 3 C (38 F).

There were the spacesuits, but their non-porous rubberized construction would have made the astronauts unbearably hot and sweat too much. Since they had only their flight suits, Lovell and Haise put on their EVA boots, while Swigert wore an extra coverall. Swigert was especially uncomfortable because his feet were wet after a spill while filling bags with drinking water.

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As if to add insult to injury, the crew couldn't even dump their urine overboard for fear of altering the spacecraft's trajectory, so more plastic bags were used for storing the waste. The cold also caused the moisture in the air to condense on the bulkheads and behind the equipment panels in both the CM and the LM. Fortunately, the electronics were all well-insulated, but it was still like living in a leaky tin shed during a winter rainstorm.

Using the Earth's terminator line between day and night as a target, the LM made two more course corrections, which was tricky because the LM's computer had been shut down to conserve power.

About half an hour later, the service module was jettisoned by firing the explosive bolts that secured it to the command module. As it drifted away, the astronauts could see the damage caused by the explosion, including to the main engine, showing that the decision to not use it was justified.

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However, they were not home free. Powering up the command module was hard enough, the protocols having been worked out in only three days, but without the reaction thrusters on the service module, the LM couldn't be jettisoned because the command module couldn't move away. This was solved by closing the hatches between Aquarius and Odyssey, leaving the air in the trunk instead of depressurizing. As the clamps were released, the air pushed the two craft apart as it escaped.

As Odyssey entered the Earth's atmosphere, the build-up of hot, ionized plasma around the capsule caused a radio blackout. If you saw the film Apollo 13, you may remember the tense scene as Mission Control waited anxiously to reestablish radio contact. This wasn't just a bit of Hollywood suspense building. The four-minute blackout stretched to six minutes, raising the fear that the heat shield had failed.

Fortunately, it did work, though exactly why the blackout was so long is still not entirely explained.

On April 17, 1970, at 18:07 GMT, Odyssey splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean and was recovered by the aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima. The mission lasted five days, 22 hours, 54 minutes, and 41 seconds.

The astronauts were in good condition despite being dehydrated and losing 50 percent more weight than any other space crew, though Haisse did have a serious urinary tract infection due to his lack of water.

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When the crew of Apollo 13 stepped onto the deck of the Iwo Jima, they were unaware that the whole world had been following their ordeal in numbers not seen since Apollo 11.

"Nobody believes me, but during this six-day odyssey we had no idea what an impression Apollo 13 made on the people of Earth," said Lovell. "We never dreamed a billion people were following us on television and radio, and reading about us in banner headlines of every newspaper published. We still missed the point onboard the carrier Iwo Jima, which picked us up, because the sailors had been as remote from the media as we were. Only when we reached Honolulu did we comprehend our impact: there we found President Nixon and [NASA Administrator] Dr. Paine to meet us, along with my wife Marilyn, Fred's wife Mary, and bachelor Jack's parents, in lieu of his usual airline stewardesses."

So what really got Apollo 13 home when the odds were so stacked against them? Certainly, courage played a part. All three men were test pilots and reacted like test pilots. Knowing that panic would do nothing other than waste precious time, they concentrated on the job at hand. Training was also important, as was innovation, as was the combination of relentless training combined with quick, expert thinking from the team on the ground.

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But a later NASA report showed that luck had its part to play as well. This isn't to diminish the part played by the astronauts, NASA, or the contractors, because luck favors the prepared.

For one thing, it was fortunate that Gene Kranz and Glynn Lunny, the most experienced flight directors, were present when the accident happened. It was also good fortune that the LM had extra fuel aboard for the course corrections. In addition, Lovell had extensive carrier landing experience, allowing him to adapt quickly to the spacecraft's counterintuitive gyrations.

There was also the timing of the accident. If the explosion had occurred while the Odyssey was undocked from Aquarius, the crew would have been without their lifeboat and the engine needed to return to Earth.

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Then there was the high-gain antenna surviving the explosion despite being damaged. This meant less than two seconds of vital data was lost. The timing of the explosion coming just after the television broadcast meant that some of the LM's systems were powered up, so emergency power wasn't needed to turn the spacecraft on. The broadcast also meant that the crew was not sleeping as scheduled, so they were already alert and active when the accident happened.

Even tragedy helped. The Apollo 1 fire in 1967 led to improvements in CM design, such as a better caution and warning system, and there were extensive electrical insulation improvements, protecting the systems against water damage.

In the short term, Apollo 13 was the mission that NASA wanted to forget. Despite the daring rescue, it was like Dunkirk a successful defeat. The space agency played down the event. The command module was gutted as part of the accident investigation and the capsule itself was unceremoniously carted off to the Muse de l'air et de l'espace in Paris, though it has since been, put back together, and is on display at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas.

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But the years have a way of changing things. In the past half-century, the legend of Apollo 13 has grown. Many lessons were learned from the harrowing adventure that were used to improve the design of later spacecraft and how they were operated. The story became the stuff of a number of best-selling books, two television plays, a feature film, and many documentaries. It's a story that continues to inform and inspire.

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"Houston, we've had a problem": The story of NASA's most successful failure - New Atlas

In the mid-2010s, an outbreak of Ebola ravaged West Africa. Between December 2013 and June 2016, the disease officially killed 11,308 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, although the World Health Organisation (WHO) believes the real figure is probably much higher.

Ebola's virulence and lethality it has a mortality rate of around 40 per cent; Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, kills roughly one per cent of sufferers, although the exact number is currently unclear made containing it an international priority. By mobilising labs around the world, a prophylactic Ebola vaccine rVSV-ZEBOV was rushed through development. In December last year, six years after the first cases were discovered in West Africa, and three years after the outbreak was officially deemed over, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally OKed it for use in the US. Compared to the normal timelines for these things, that still represents astonishing speed.

In the wake of the Ebola outbreak, WHO has taken a front-foot approach. Every year it publishes a list of key diseases it sees as the major issues the medical research community needs to tackle. The Blueprint For Diseases, as its called, highlights the diseases that could break out into epidemics in the next 12 months. It's a guide for the research community, an attempt to steer its resources to where they're most required. Currently, Covid-19 tops the list. Lurking at the bottom, as it has been every year since the Blueprint was first published in 2016, is something that sounds like it's been pulled from the pages of a comic: Disease X.

To create a vaccine in 18 months is unprecedented in human history. No vaccine has ever been developed at that speed.

Thats the unknown, brand new pathogen that springs up, says Rachel Grant, of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. CEPI was formed in 2017, after the Ebola crisis made apparent the lack of a single, coordinating voice in the research and development (R&D) of vaccines. Its founding partners included the nation of Norway, the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the UK Research Foundation. (Since then, Germany and Japan have signed up, too.) What happened with Ebola was the world tragically realised they reacted too late," says Grant. "The whole system was too fragmented to respond in an effective way.

Disease X has long been recognised as an issue. Before coronavirus, the last brand new pathogen to spring up was the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which infected an estimated half-a-million people between 2015 and 2016. At the time of writing, Covid-19 had infected at least 1.5 million people and killed 90,000 (see the most recent numbers at Johns Hopkins Universitys live map of global cases).

The focus of the R&D world is now squarely on Covid-19, and the race is on to develop a vaccine. If the boffins and academics are to succeed, they will have to move at a previously unheard-of pace. Vaccine researchers are used to working on vaccines for decades, but with coronavirus, we cant wait that long. More than 60 teams across the globe are trying to find a way to protect the worlds population up from around 40 two weeks ago and the more optimistic among them think there could be a vaccine ready in 12 to 18 months. That is unprecedented in human history, says Grant. No vaccine has ever been developed at that speed. But they have to try.

Professor Katie Ewer hated immunology when she was an undergraduate. She had been interested in biology since she was a child, fascinated by seemingly endless processes that occur in our cells and organs every second of our lives without us knowing about it. When she didn't get into medical school she trained as a microbiologist instead, and grew fascinated by infectious diseases. Ive always had a real obsession with the human body, anatomy and how it works, she says. Eventually, she came to see immunology as its "ultimate expression". After a PhD in the subject she landed at Oxford University's Jenner Institute, and has spent the 13 years since working on a malaria vaccine, to try and halt the spread of a disease that kills 500,000 people every year.

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Thirteen years may sound like a long time, but vaccines are difficult to develop, especially when they're for diseases that largely impact the poorer parts of the world. A malaria vaccine would save tens of millions of lives, but it would be less profitable than, say, a drug that reverses hair loss or makes you lose weight. So not-for-profits like the Jenner Institute, where Ewer is a senior scientist, do the work that big pharma won't prioritise. According to The Global Fund, $5 billion is needed to keep development of a malaria vaccine on track. In 2018, researchers received $2.8 billion, a drop from the year before. That Covid-19 has spread through the global west has, perversely, probably accelerated the search for its vaccine.

To create a vaccine, you need to know what you're fighting, which is why, on 11 January, researchers in Shanghai leaked the genetic sequence of the coronavirus, after realising that Chinese authorities had no intention of releasing it globally. The next day, their lab was closed for "rectification". Their sacrifice enabled teams around the world to mobilise.

"We go round the lab with a tape measure, measure two metres, work out the number of people who can safely work in a particular area"

Vaccines work by training your body to react in a certain way, like teaching a child to catch a ball. The first time you throw it, it bounces off them. The second time, maybe they put up an arm to protect themselves. Eventually, they'll learn to predict its flight, get their hands in the right place, and time when they should wrap their fingers around the ball. It's become an innate reaction that happens almost without thinking.

In the same way, the first time your body is exposed to a new virus, it doesn't know how to react. Being infected with Covid-19 is like turning a tennis ball launcher on that child before they've learnt to catch they'll be overwhelmed. But introduce a measured, non-fatal dose and our body learns to battle it, even when confronted by a larger amount. This is done by injecting antigens (or small molecules of the virus, which is a pathogen) into the body. The immune system recognises a harmful alien presence and, through a process of trial and error, creates antibodies to battle it. Once it's been destroyed, your body remembers the specific antibodies it needs to produce if the virus returns say, through live infection so it can mobilise more quickly. (This is also why those who've already been infected almost certainly can't catch Covid-19 a second time, unless the virus mutates.)

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Before the advent of genetic medicine, vaccines worked by injecting patients with either a dead form of a virus, so it couldn't replicate inside the body, or a similar but less harmful pathogen (Edward Jenner, for whom the Jenner Institute is named, all-but invented vaccination in the 1790s when he realised that if you deliberately infected someone with the comparatively harmless cowpox virus, they wouldn't catch smallpox). Today, making a vaccine isn't simple, but it is standardised. The actual platform the backbone of the vaccine is always the same, whatever the disease, says Ewer. Researchers just slot in a little bit of the genetic information from the new virus.

The Jenner Institute develops a multitude of different vaccines at any one time, and at the start of the year, Ewers colleague, Professor Theresa Lamb, was handling its coronavirus research. By the middle of February, the Institute had recognised that the early stages of their vaccine production had gone well, and were preparing to test it in a clinical trial. Suddenly the small number of people working on the vaccine under Lamb ballooned. Ewer was drafted to help in the effort, one of around 60 people including doctors and nurses who are screening potential trial participants and laboratory staff developing tests and assays working on the project. Many are working from home: the lab doesnt want people in unnecessarily, in case they contract or spread the disease. We go round [the laboratory] with a tape measure, we measure two metres, work out the number of people who can safely work at that distance in a particular area of the lab, says Ewer. Its really boring, just the same as any other supermarket or shop.

The potential outcome is far from boring. Covid-19 has changed our scientific landscape in terms of how fast things are moving, says Dr Melvin Sanicas, a vaccinologist and medical director at Takeda, a Japanese pharmaceutical company. Since its genetic sequence was released, two teams have got candidate vaccines into clinical trials. One is based on an Ebola vaccine, developed by CanSino Biological Inc, a Hong Kong company, in collaboration with the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology. The other is from a Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company, Moderna (who declined to speak for this story).

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In the 70 years since the first identified coronavirus infection in humans, no vaccine has ever got beyond Phase II trials, which means labs are taking diverse approaches to finding one now. The Asian plan uses a non-replicating viral vector essentially, the dead vaccine. The Moderna plan uses an RNA vaccine, in which human cells are injected with the disease's RNA a simpler version of DNA, used by cellular organisms like viruses in the hope that it will absorb it and start to produce antibodies. The former isn't so different from Jenner's original method; the Moderna plan is based on science that, so far, is largely theoretical, but which will be much quicker to test and produce than those made by the traditional method. If it works.

But finding a vaccine that defeats a disease is merely step one. You test the vaccine candidates in cell cultures or animal models to see if the vaccine candidate is safe and whether its able to induce an immune response, says Sanicas. The right immune response sees the body fight back against the pathogen, without being overwhelmed by it some candidate vaccines have to be shelved because the virus wins. Get it to work in cell cultures or animal models, and youre through the pre-clinical phase. You can now try and test it in humans.

"With any vaccine there is a risk of rare serious adverse events."

Testing is the time-consuming part. The team at Oxford University recently put out a call for participants across the Thames Valley area, asking for 510 participants in total. More than half will be given the actual vaccine, and 250 will be given a control. Theyll be monitored over the next six months to see how the vaccine is working researchers are looking for an immune response, but also check for side-effects that might be worse than the disease. In exchange, the participants will get up to 625, and the pride of knowing theyre helping save the world. The amount is relatively low (participants in a botched clinical trial in the mid-2000s got 2,000 each), and the risk real: an accompanying document acknowledges with any vaccination there is a risk of rare serious adverse events.

All vaccines entering clinical trials on humans go through three stepped stages. The Oxford trial will test only a few people to start with, to make sure everything works correctly and safely, before increasing the numbers. Well try and get up to vaccinating some quite big numbers of people in a short space of time, says Ewer. In less urgent times, that means thousands of participants over several years, because it can take months for an immune response to show up in healthy subjects.

To progress, a vaccine needs to produce positive results at all three stages. Normally, that means an effectiveness of at least 97 per cent, says Sanicas, although the pandemic is so severe that any potential coronavirus vaccine could be rolled out with results as low as 70 per cent.

Next, you start applying to national regulatory bodies the FDA in the US, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency in the UK, and the European Medicines Agency in the EU for approval. Once theyve determined the vaccine is safe, effective and made using quality production mechanisms, they approve the vaccine for use, says Sanicas. Getting from identification to commercial vaccine normally takes the best part of a decade.

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Faced with a pandemic, there's always a temptation to cut corners. Every extra day jumping through red tape means thousands of people dead, tens of thousands more infected. But the scientific community has learned that a bad vaccine is worse than no vaccine. In the mid-2000s, trials of an experimental leukaemia drug in London went wrong, seriously damaging six participants without that testing, actual patients could have been given a drug that was more likely to kill them than their disease. And all vaccine development lives in the shadow of a terrible series of events in 1976, when the threat of a swine flu epidemic across the US led the government to instigate mass vaccination. To speed up production, they opted to use a "live" virus, rather than an inactive strain. Of the inoculated, one in 100,000 contracted a neurological disease called GuillainBarr syndrome, in which the bodys immune system attacks its own nerves, causing permanent paralysis. Since then, speed has always come second to safety.

But time can be saved if you can organise people properly. "Getting the regulatory authorities to focus, to come together, to really understand the data, all of that will make a difference to the timeframe for this," says Grant. Medical advances have also sped up the process of getting a vaccine to trial safely. The Oxford team is also changing the way they work, to speed things up without sacrificing safety, says Ewer. Were doing a lot of things in parallel that we would ordinarily do one after the other."

But they arent the only team on the cusp of clinical trials.

A tobacco warehouse in Owensboro, Kentucky may seem like an odd place for a coronavirus vaccine to emanate, but we live in strange times. British American Tobacco (BAT), which some might say is a company best known for killing people, has also entered the race to save lives. Right now, I would hope we could leave the politics of tobacco and smoking to one side," says Kingsley Wheaton, who leads marketing at BAT, "in order that we try and focus on the matter at hand right here, right now, which is solving this Covid-19 problem globally."

A few years ago, recognising it was selling fewer cigarettes every year, BAT invested in a company called Kentucky BioProcessing, to help find new uses for the tobacco plants it was growing but which people weren't smoking. They were especially interested in a protein that could be harvested and processed as animal feed. You take a small, hardy Australian tobacco varietal, and around halfway through its growing cycle impregnate it with an antigen for the protein. It replicates at a tremendous scale. The plant is a mini-factory, if you like, says Wheaton.

It became clear that this might also be a way to produce vaccines quickly and cheaply. Instead of an antigen developing a feedstock protein, Kentucky BioProcessing realised they could develop the antigens of viruses. You could clone in fields, rather than Petri dishes. In 2014, as Ebola was killing people in Africa, Kentucky BioProcessing put its newly acquired company to work. Improbably, Kentucky BioProcessing developed ZMapp, an Ebola drug that the World Health Organisation concluded, in 2018, had benefits [that] outweigh the risks (science has since thrown doubts on its effectiveness, however).

Every year since, Kentucky BioProcessing has worked on a seasonal flu vaccine; this year's was heading into the first stage of clinical trials when the coronavirus began its rampage across the globe. Now, the business has been reoriented to aid Covid-19 vaccine development: 50 staff members are devoted to growing an antigen that can create a vaccine in tobacco plants in a matter of weeks. You extract it, purify it and hey presto theres a vaccine. Results from pre-clinical trials in animals are pending, at which point it will move into clinical trials which may be anything from 12 to 18 months, even with a fair wind, Wheaton says.

What if they all worked together? Wouldnt it get done in half the time? No.

Not that theyre waiting that long. Even if BAT's vaccine is ineffective, its production technique could be a game-changer. Because a pandemic is different from an epidemic, and the need for a vaccine is everywhere and at the same time, youve also got to think about manufacturing capacity, says CEPIs Grant. If youre thinking about developing a vaccine for an epidemic, youre talking millions of doses of whatever it is youve developed. A pandemic, youre talking about billions.

BAT plans to start production on their vaccine even before it knows whether it works, making between one and three million a week, just in case. Wheaton is at pains to point out that if the vaccine isnt approved, it wont be used, but if it turns out our candidate vaccine is the right one, it would be good to have a stockpile of these things.

This is where research diversity becomes so important. People may look at the vast array of organisations, private companies, university laboratories and oddball developers trying to produce different vaccines simultaneously in all four corners of the world and think, What if they all worked together? Wouldnt it get done in half the time? Not so, says Grant, whose list of teams working on a vaccine tops 90. You are always better to have a diversified approach than you are to have a really narrow one, she says. You never want a single point of failure in a situation like this." With vaccines, there are too many potential failure points to count.

Pedro VilelaGetty Images

During the West African Ebola crisis, pharma giant Merck was one of the first to get a drug through clinical trials. Its vaccine, rVSV Zebov-GP, had 100 per cent efficacy, but a zero per cent chance of actually being used at scale; it needed to be stored at 80C. You try getting a vaccine supposed to be stored at 80C out to war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo and youve got massive supply problems, says Grant. Which is why it was handy there was investment in another vaccine, by Johnson & Johnson, that wasn't so temperamental.

Most drug research works on a winner-takes-all model: invent Viagra, or Minoxodil, or Oxycontin, and you get a 20-year exclusivity licence (in the US). That means you can charge as much for it as you like. Once the licence lapses, competitors can create generic versions and the price falls. With a pandemic vaccine, the rules of the marketplace make less sense. There's healthy competition, but its against nature, not each other.

"Im trying to do as much as I can do in the working day and then go home and try and be a mum to my kids at home."

That said, there are economic incentives at play: make the vaccine everyone wants and you can at least recoup the costs of developing it. CEPI has ploughed $23 million into the eight programmes it's supporting underway, and estimates it will cost something like $2 billion more to get three of those into clinical testing. Altruism is fuelling initial development, but at some point realism steps in. Still, any CEPI-developed vaccines wont result in a free-for-all (the US government's reported attempts to buy German pharmaceutical group CureVac, to get at its potential coronavirus vaccine first, hint at what could happen with international cooperation). CEPI has a stringent policy on equitable access and believes that work needs to be done now at an intra-governmental level to decide a way for people who need the vaccine most, such as healthcare workers and the vulnerable, to access it first.

Regardless, developers are keen to help in any way they can. Were one of many in that area, but wed also be delighted to take a candidate vaccine and become a fast-scale manufacturer through our plant-based system, says Wheaton.

For those in the labs, competition isn't a concern. They worry about the pressure of getting a vaccine right and getting it quickly. When I ask Ewer if the process of developing a vaccine has been stressful, she replies with one word: "Yes".

I try not to think about it too much, she eventually adds. Shes stopped watching the news; a regular Twitter user, shes now shunning the app. I had to stop engaging with it because if I think too much about it, I get really stressed. If I think too much about what happens if none of this works, then I feel a bit overwhelmed, so Im trying to do as much as I can do in the working day and then go home and try and be a mum to my kids at home, try and keep things as normal for them as possible, because its weird for the family as well as it is for everybody.

"Hopefully one of us will produce a vaccine that is effective. I dont really mind if its ours or anybody elses, as long as one of them works."

It can be easy to forget, as we praise our scientists and our doctors, our nurses and the collective brainpower of the experts working to lead us out of this crisis, that theyre human beings, too. The risks of getting it wrong are real and they feel them every day.

If you ask me whether I want this really quick, or I want a robust process, I would pick the safe and robust process, says Sanicas, who worries were all getting caught up in the hype around 18 months to a vaccine. I dont want this to be just a vaccine you bring quickly to the market but were not sure about the long-term effects. He thinks itll take two years for anything to come to fruition.

Near the end of our conversation, I ask Ewer if theres one thing she wishes the general public who are clamouring for a Covid-19 vaccine as eagerly as they are for sufficient testing capacity knew about her work. I expected her to explain the challenges of the vaccine, or to caution about its progress (she believes the best case scenario is that by autumn this year the Oxford team will have evidence of the vaccine being safe and able to induce a good immune response). I didnt expect her to answer as she did.

I think I would like people to know there are lots of people working very, very hard on this, she explains. Making vaccines is difficult and its expensive, but there are at least 30 different groups around the world, all trying to produce a vaccine against this disease, and hopefully one of us will produce a vaccine that is effective. I dont really mind if its ours or anybody elses, but as long as one of them works, thats the most important thing.

She pauses for a moment, then picks up her train of thought. As long as somebody gets there, we dont mind if its us, or Moderna, or anyone else. As long as one of us gets there, and we can make enough of it quickly enough to make an impact.

The information in this story is accurate as of the publication date. While we are attempting to keep our content as up-to-date as possible, the situation surrounding the coronavirus pandemic continues to develop rapidly, so it's possible that some information and recommendations may have changed since publishing. For any concerns and latest advice, visit the World Health Organisation. If you're in the UK, the National Health Service can also provide useful information and support, while US users can contact the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

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When Will There Be A Coronavirus Vaccine? - esquire.com

The Daily Bruin isnt printing this quarter, but this isnt the first time weve scaled back on print production.

Just this week, the Daily Bruins upper management announced that the Daily Bruin would cease print production through the end of the 2019-2020 academic year, in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

After all, it doesnt really make much sense to print 6,000 copies of a student newspaper every day when most of the student body has left campus and instruction is entirely remote.

Originally, managements plan was to cease printing until April 10 in line with the schools initial plans to return for in-person instruction by week three. But the ever-changing nature of the pandemic has lead to the extension of remote instruction and, consequently, the extension of digital-only production for the Daily Bruin.

The Daily Bruin staff had to make a similar decision regarding print production back in the 1940s, when the United States entered World War II. In Aprils updated letter from the editors, The Bruins upper management notes that this is the first time since World War II that the paper has ceased to be printed five days a week. However, this is the first time in our entire history that the paper has ceased printing entirely during the war, the paper continued printing three days a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

While the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on The Bruin certainly draws parallels to that of World War II, the situation necessitated different responses in the way the paper scaled back its print production. The response to the current situation came relatively swiftly, but in the 1940s, the shifts in the papers production cycle were much slower and evolved throughout the course of the war.

As UCLA alumnus George Garrigues noted in his history of the Daily Bruin, the U.S. entered World War II right around the same time students were gearing up for finals. Late in the evening on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, the papers staff scratched its original layout for Mondays front page and replaced it with a number of articles about the bombing of Pearl Harbor from the United Press wire service with the bold-faced headline Japan Declares War!

Print production didnt slow down right away. Through the end of the semester this was decades before the university switched over to the quarter system, of course Garrigues writes that war news blanketed The Bruins front page.

The paper did produce a shortened version on Dec. 11 this was, however, unintentional. During wartime, governments across the world used to impose blackouts, during which lights would be shut off for short periods of time, in an effort to prepare for potential attacks as well as to make it more difficult for bombers to navigate urban areas that would normally be well-lit at night. Garrigues writes that the first U.S. blackout of the war struck Southern California on Dec. 10, 1941 and the Daily Bruin editors had to publish a shortened three-page paper, composed of a broadsheet front page and two compact tabloid pages following it.

Due to the loss of time during last nights blackout the Daily Bruin today appears in a form unique in the annals of journalism a three-page paper, wrote the then-Editor-in-Chief Malcolm Steinlauf on the front page of the paper.

It wasnt until 1943 that the papers print format began to change for good. As staffers were drafted into the war, the size of the staff shrank, and so did the paper. On Jan. 4, 1943, The Bruin switched from the lengthy broadsheet layout it had been printing for decades before and as it is typically printed today to a smaller tabloid one, comparable in size and shape to that of papers like LA Weekly.

Later that year, the paper shifted to printing only three times a week. Following the publication of the papers 1943 Registration Issue, The Bruin began publishing three times a week during the week of July 5 (Interestingly, The Bruin only publishes a paper once a week during summer sessions nowadays).

In terms of wartime content, Garrigues notes that The Bruin took a largely liberal stance, with especial opposition against the internment of Japanese Americans; conservative groups in particular, those investigating communism at UCLA did not look upon The Bruin favorably. Then-dean Earl J. Miller even went as far as saying that UCLA would be better off without a school newspaper entirely, Garrigues writes.

Luckily, Miller didnt get his way as we all know, the paper survived opposition from conservative admins and readers. Following the end of the war, the paper resumed daily production, and has consistently published five days a week since fall of 1945. Until today, that is, when the pandemic once again puts us in a situation in which print production is not in the best interest of our students or staff.

Fortunately for the UCLA community, were living in an age in which cutting print production doesnt hold quite the same weight that it would have in the 1940s had the Daily Bruins then-upper management decided to cease printing the paper entirely, its possible there would have been no Daily Bruin at all. It goes without saying that temporarily switching to a digital-only media source would have been, well, impossible without any sort of internet to get things going.

While reading Daily Bruin stories online might not have the same novelty as picking up a paper and skimming through it on your daily walk to class, its a reminder that were all going through different adjustments to the current pandemic and doing our best to get through this safely and sanely. Just like The Bruin returned full-time in 1945, the papers staff is excited to come back to Kerckhoff Hall 118 and get the printers running once its safe to do so again whenever that may be.

Read more from the original source:
Press Pass: Looking back on when the Daily Bruin reduced print production during World War II - Daily Bruin