Always ready to act on an opportunity, Moderna says that it is developing a vaccine for monkeypox, a rare disease caused by monkeypox virus. The Cambridge biotech announced its plans Monday on Twitter, just five days after the virus was first detected in Massachusetts.
As of Tuesday, there was one confirmed and four suspected cases of monkeypox in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that the virus, which spreads through close contact, has recently been detected in at least 15 other countries, mostly in Europe.
It is unclear how large the outbreaks will grow. President Biden said Sunday that the virus “is something that everybody should be concerned about.” On Monday, he added that the United States should have enough vaccines “to deal with the likelihood of a problem.”
Bavarian Nordic, a pharma company headquartered in Denmark, makes a vaccine called Jynneos, which is approved for smallpox and monkeypox in the United States. The CDC said Monday that the US has more than 1,000 of those shots in the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile, which it will start distributing to at-risk individuals. The government expects to receive more shots from Bavarian Nordic in the coming weeks.
The country also has more than 100 million doses of an older shot, called ACAM2000, which is designed to prevent smallpox but could also be used to prevent monkeypox — a related but typically less contagious and less deadly disease.
That vaccine was previously owned by Sanofi, but in 2017 the firm sold it to Emergent BioSolutions, the Maryland company that repeatedly made headlines during the pandemic for its troubles manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines for AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax.
The small New Jersey biotech Tonix Pharmaceuticals also said that it is working on a monkeypox vaccine, although its candidate, which has been in preclinical development for several years, is based on a related virus called horsepox.
Moderna provided no details about its monkeypox vaccine program beyond saying that it is at a “preclinical” stage of development. A spokesperson for the company said additional details may be disclosed later this week.
Several unique circumstances enabled the rapid development of Moderna’s vaccine for COVID-19, which took just 63 days to go from viral sequence to clinical trial. That record-breaking speed may set unrealistic expectations for how quickly the company will be able to make other shots.
Earlier work on a different coronavirus that provided a template for Moderna and its collaborators at the National Institutes of Health to design a vaccine for COVID-19 in just two days. The company then used machines normally dedicated to making its experimental personalized cancer vaccines to quickly manufacture the COVID shots.
And because regulators saw that COVID-19 was on its way to becoming a global pandemic, the US Food and Drug Administration took the unusual step of allowing Moderna to start testing the safety of the vaccine in a small group of people before the company finished studying it in animals. It was another few months before the it could begin assessing the efficacy of the shots in more people.
Moderna has not previously disclosed work on vaccines for monkeypox or related viruses. If the company is starting from scratch, the design of the vaccine may take much longer than it did for COVID-19, and likely require more extensive testing in animals before human trials can begin.
Ryan Cross can be reached at ryan.cross@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @RLCscienceboss.