A Comparative Analysis of Clinical Stage 3 COVID-19 Vaccines using Knowledge Representation

Abstract

AbstractThe emergence of a novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at the end of 2019 and its accelerated spread worldwide to become a pandemic has had, from the medical biotechnology point of view, an unprecedented global response, to the point that there are currently 176 vaccine candidates in preclinical stage, 66 in clinical stage, of which 19 are in phase 3, and 5 of these are massively applied worldwide. The purpose of the present work is to elaborate a hierarchical landscape of the current status of phase 3 vaccines, taking into account their attributes of technological platform, safety and efficacy. The methodology used was that of conceptual knowledge representation, resulting in, firstly, an appropriate classification of stage 3 vaccines, The Conceptual Lattice for COVID-19 vaccines, constructed according to how they relate to each other with respect to the set of their attributes. Secondly, the approach used allows proposing rational strategies for the design of heterologous vaccination schemes, which are urgently needed to control the pandemic.