Fighting the pandemic on all fronts
KAIMRC is at the forefront of the nation’s fight against COVID-19 by ramping up coronavirus research, says Naif Alharbi, one of Saudi Arabia’s leading virologists
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irologist and infectious disease researcher Naif Alharbi has been a central figure in KAIMRC’s coronavirus vaccine efforts. As the director of the vaccine development unit, Alharbi is leading KAIMRC’s phase I MERS vaccine clinical trial while also overseeing SARS-CoV-2-related research. He has spearheaded serostudies on COVID-19 to gauge immune response and to measure past and current disease risk in the Saudi population. The Saudi Ministry of Health is overseeing vaccine acquisition and distribution. While there has been a lull in scheduling vaccinations due to Pfizer/BioNTech supply shortages, the situation is expected to improve as the ministry tops up its stocks.
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June 2021
The COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca has also been approved for use in the kingdom, which should help relieve supply problems. In addition, new vaccination centres have been opened throughout Saudi Arabia to help meet the ministry’s goal and complete the vaccination of the remaining 26 million citizens by the end of 2021. KAIMRC continues to focus on conducting and supporting vaccine research and testing more vaccines, in collaboration with the ministry, to expand the roster of shots. At the end of 2020, Alharbi and a consortium of researchers published a survey of SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in healthcare and medical workers in Saudi Arabia.
He and his colleagues are currently preparing to submit a national COVID-19 seroprevalence study after collecting upwards of 11,000 serum samples from across Saudi Arabia to survey national seroprevalence between June and November 2020. KAIMRC Innovations spoke to Alharbi about this research, the Kingdom’s preparedness for defence against the pandemic and KAIMRC’s unprecedented push towards expanding virus research. Innovations: Many experts believe that KSA had a head start in responding to COVID-19 thanks to its previous experience with MERS. For instance, KAIMRC already had infrastructure such as vaccine development technology and diagnostics
