Latin American countries not only developed their own covid vaccine prototypes but also rolled them out. Martín De Ambrosio reports on a region taking its first steps towards vaccine security
When the pandemic shook the world in 2020, Argentina, like many countries, went into full lockdown. Juliana Cassataro, a researcher at the National University of General San Martín, wondered what her team could do to help. The answer was obvious for a researcher specialising in oral vaccines: make one.
“From the beginning we planned to make it as a booster—we realised that we couldn’t compete with developers with millions and millions of dollars and the support of bigger nation states,” says Cassataro. Her team received a small grant of $100 000 from the Argentine ministry of science in May 2020 to design a prototype based on Cassataro’s specialism: recombinant protein vaccines.
Confidence was not high. Colleagues and politicians told them to give up—it was not feasible to produce a vaccine “with only a few thousand dollars.”
By October 2020, however, Cassataro had produced two formulas with good results in mice, but ran short on materials. As the team approached pharma and biotech companies to help, they told Cassataro that her results were good but that “you will never make it, not in Argentina.”
Today, her team of nine—most of them women—are completing enrolment for a phase 3 clinical trial of their vaccine Arvac-Cecilia Grierson, named after the first female physician in Argentina. They did …