Sanofi Pasteur has company in its pursuit for a vaccine for COVID-19.

In February, Sanofi Pasteur, which has a manufacturing facility in Swiftwater, announced its partnership with the federal government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. The plan was to use Sanofi’s recombinant technology and the COVID-19 strain sequence to beat it.

“Recombinant technology produces an exact genetic match to proteins found on the surface of the virus,” explained Nicolas Kressman, a spokesman for Sanofi in Primary Care for North America.

Sanofi Pasteur developed the recombinant technology several years ago in response to the SARS virus.

Since COVID-19 is in the same family of other corona viruses such as SARS, John Shiver, senior vice president of Vaccines Global Research and Development at Sanofi, said “Leveraging this previous SARS work and our recombinant vaccine platform may unlock a faster path forward for developing a COVID-19 vaccine, allowing for the rapid production of large quantities of the COVID-19 antigen.”

Also in the race for a vaccine is a federally-funded clinical trial also using the COVID-19 strain sequence.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and scientists at Moderna Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have a vaccine called mRNA-1273.

Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine candidate that started human trials in March received emergency Phase II approval from the Food and Drug Administration, the biotechnology company announced Thursday.

Phase II means a company can expand its clinical study and the vaccine is given to more people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Moderna said it will begin the next round of trials with 600 participants shortly.

The Massachusetts-based company is one of about 100 research groups around the world pursuing vaccines against the coronavirus.

Dr. Kathleen Neuzil, director of the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is part of a team of experts working with this vaccine. She said the scientific community isn’t competing to be the first to create a vaccine.

“We want as many different types of formulations,” she said. “You can’t count on a single vaccine. We want a lot of shots on goal right now, hoping that we’ll score with at least one of these.”

Clinical trials

Sanofi’s expects to begin a clinical trial for people in about 12 to 18 months, spokesperson Nicholas Kressman said.

Their vaccine is being worked on in Meriden, Connecticut, but manufacturing would take place in Swiftwater and Pearl River, New York. Kressman expects they will be able to produce up to 600 million doses, without compromising the supply of vaccines for other illnesses.

Another vaccine hot on their heels is at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Dr. Andrea Gambotto, associate professor of surgery at the Pitt School of Medicine, said in a news release they have experience working with the SARS virus in 2003 and MERS virus in 2014.

“These two viruses, which are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, teach us that a particular protein, called a spike protein, is important for inducing immunity against the virus. We knew exactly where to fight this new virus,” she said.

The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is now seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and plan to begin Phase I of a human clinical trial in the next few months.