NMSU grad working toward COVID-19 vaccine

Not long after the onset of COVID-19 in March, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Fred Hutch) in Seattle switched gears to host the largest publicly funded organization in the United States working on a COVID-19 vaccine.

Helping to guide outreach and education as part of Fred Hutch’s COVID-19 Prevention Network is New Mexico State University graduate Francisco E. “Frankie” Rentas.

Rentas, 38, and his colleagues connect remotely from different states and countries to put together studies – some involving tens of thousands of people from across the country and around the world – “focused on the science of protecting people from COVID,” Rentas said.

His HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN)/COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN) Social Behavioral Sciences & Community Engagement team takes the lead in community engagement, educating people about the virus “in a culturally responsible way” and recruiting participants in COVID-19 studies in the search for an effective vaccine.

The 11-member team is “the bridge between the science and the people we need to move the science forward,” Rentas said. “Our main mission is to make that science relatable to educate our community and to build partnerships and trust within those communities so we can recruit the people we need to be part of our studies.”

The CoVPN is partnering with the federal government and pharmaceutical companies on multiple studies to find the vaccine, Rentas said. If the first study is successful, he said, a vaccine could be available within months. If not, other studies “are coming through the pipeline right behind it,” he said, with each potentially being the one that produces the vaccine that works.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is already stockpiling millions of doses of study vaccines, Rentas said, so when the one that works is found, the FDA “is ready to go” with its production.

“We know that there is the urgency and we know that people want this now because they want life to go back to normal and they’re worried about themselves and their families,” Rentas said.

But, while the process of finding a vaccine is “moving much faster than normal,” he said, “you don’t do it so fast that you’re not fully testing the safety. You don’t skip any steps to determine that. We want the vaccine as fast as everyone else does, but those safety measures for any vaccine study are still in place for our COVID vaccine studies.”

Each study vaccine begins with laboratory tests, he said, then moves on to studies involving animals, including mice. If it continues to show promise, the study vaccine moves on to multiple phases of human study. The first couple are done in small groups of about 100 people each, Rentas said, adding that researchers monitor the study vaccine’s safety and side effects, determine the proper dosage and ensure that it produces an immune response in the body.

With data from the smaller group studies, researchers then move on to “large-scale, phase III efficacy studies,” Rentas said. For these, he said, CoVPN will “bring in thousands of people from a diverse geographic area, from the U.S. and internationally.”

These groups must be diverse in terms of age, health, gender and ethnicity, Rentas said.

In phase III, half of each study group receives the actual study vaccine, while the other half gets a placebo. That’s necessary, Rentas said, because there is no earlier vaccine to which the study product can be compared.

“It’s out of the phase III studies that we get to see, does the study vaccine work?” Rentas said. “Does it actually prevent coronavirus infection?”

After phase III success, the FDA can make the vaccine publicly available.

“Our first phase III study started in July,” Rentas said, and is at nearly one-half of its full 30,000-participant enrollment. “That’s fast,” Rentas said. But, “there’s no telling when we’re going to get end-point data. We’ll just have to wait and see. We’ve got multiple phase III studies happening, one right behind the other,” he said, most with about 30,000 participants and one with 60,000.

“That’s a lot of people entering these studies compared to other vaccine studies. It’s never been done this way this quickly,” Rentas said.

Fred Hutch and the HVTN were a smart choice to lead the COVID-19 vaccine studies, Rentas said, because they could quickly assemble a new collaboration which became the CoVPN. The infrastructure was already in place from cancer and infectious diseases research dating to the 1970s and the search for an HIV vaccine that began nearly 20 years ago.

Rentas graduated from NMSU with a degree in theatre in 2005, moved to Seattle in 2007, earned a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Washington and discovered in 2011 that the HVTN at Fred Hutch was conducting HIV-vaccine trials.

“I was very intrigued,” Rentas said. “I live in Seattle, a city where all this cutting-edge stuff is happening.”

Rentas signed up for one of HVTN’s studies, and “that is what opened my world to scientific research,” he said. “That’s where I want to be,” Rentas realized, so he applied for a job.

Rentas was hired by Fred Hutch in 2012 as a cancer information specialist and tobacco cessation counselor. He moved up to project coordinator for the Geographic Management of Cancer Health Disparities program before finally landing a job at the HVTN as a program assistant. In August, Rentas was promoted to project manager for Fred Hutch’s HVTN/CoVPN Social Behavioral Sciences & Community Engagement team.

For more information, visit https://www.preventcovid.org.