Vaccines play an essential role in disease prevention, helping minimize the spread of contagious illness and saving countless lives. Before vaccines ever gain widespread use in humans, however, they undergo years of research and development, with multiple rounds of clinical testing, to ensure that the final product is safe and effective. The development process culminates in approval by a government regulatory agency. But how is a vaccine approved, and what are the factors that govern approval?
Each country or region has its own approvals agency. For example, the United States has the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Europe has the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Australia has its Therapeutic Goods Administration, and China has its China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA). Each of these agencies has its own process in place, but, in general, when considering the approval of new drugs, their decisions are based on scientific and technological information. This information is obtained through a series of preclinical studies (in cells and animal models), followed by three phases of clinical trials in humans, each phase having distinct aims and increasingly large populations of test subjects. Once these trials are completed, the drug sponsor or developer submits a drug application for review and approval by its country’s regulatory agency.
The new drug application includes all data collected from animal and human trials, data analyses, details on drug manufacture, and details on the drug’s effects on the human body. In the United States the new drug application is reviewed by a team of scientists, which includes chemists, physicians, and pharmacologists, who are part of the FDA’s consumer watchdog Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). A major part of the CDER team’s review is focused on the evaluation of safety and effectiveness. Approved agents are advanced to drug labeling and marketing.
An important aspect of the approval process, in addition to assessing drug safety and effectiveness, is enabling the rapid movement of novel and innovative drugs through the regulatory process. Under certain circumstances, the approval of a new drug may be expedited. The U.S. FDA has four mechanisms available to speed drug approval: accelerated approval, priority review, breakthrough therapy, and fast track. Accelerated approval, which allows for approval consideration based on a surrogate endpoint (e.g., a blood test) rather than clinical results, and fast track, which allows for “rolling” submission of additional data from clinical trials to the FDA as data becomes available, speed the approval of drugs that fill unmet medical needs. Breakthrough therapy consideration expedites the review of drugs that significantly improve upon currently available therapy. Priority review means that a drug’s application will be advanced for review within six months of submission.
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Why do these designations matter? Consider the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented effort to develop a novel vaccine against the causative agent, SARS-CoV-2, in record time. Numerous vaccines are under development, by many different companies and medical research entities. By the end of August 2020, some 36 vaccines had entered clinical trials in humans, many having raced through preclinical trials at breakneck speed. In the United States, some of these vaccines were likely to receive emergency use authorization, meaning that they would be made available to the general population before being formally approved.