With COVID-19 cases worldwide passing the 200,000 mark and continuing to grow, scientists are pushing forward with efforts to develop vaccines and treatments to slow the pandemic and lessen its damage.

Some of the earliest treatments will likely be drugs that are already approved for other conditions or have been tested on other viruses.

People are looking into whether existing antivirals might work or whether new drugs could be developed to try to tackle the virus, said Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of health policy and management at City University of New York.

Still, theres only so much that vaccine and drug development can be sped up, even with improvements in genetic sequencing and other technologies.

Even though technological advances allow us to do certain things more quickly, Lee told Healthline, we still have to rely on social distancing, contact tracing, self-isolation, and other measures.

Heres a rundown of the latest COVID-19 vaccine and drug developments.

Several companies are developing or testing antivirals against the virus that causes COVID-19.

Antivirals target the virus in people who already have an infection. They work in different ways, sometimes preventing the virus from replicating, other times blocking it from infecting cells.

Lee says antivirals work better if you administer them sooner, before the virus has a chance to multiply significantly.

And also before the virus has caused significant damage to the body, such as to the lungs or other tissues.

Dr. Robert Amler, dean of the School of Health Sciences and Practice at New York Medical College and former chief medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), says both antivirals and vaccines will be valuable tools in combating COVID-19.

However, he told Healthline that antivirals are likely to be developed and approved before a vaccine, which typically takes longer.

Drug development is sometimes described as a pipeline with compounds moving from early laboratory development to laboratory and animal testing to clinical trials in people.

It can take a decade or more for a new compound to go from initial discovery to the marketplace. Many compounds never even make it that far.

Thats why antivirals being eyed as treatments for COVID-19 are drugs that already exist. They include:

Scientists are also looking at other ways to target the virus or treat the complications of COVID-19, such as:

While a lot of the focus is on developing new treatments for COVID-19, improvements in how doctors care for patients using existing technology are also crucial.

The things that we have to worry about with the novel coronavirus is that it can cause pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome, Lee said. There are ways of treating those things that can reduce the effects, so doctors are trying to use those as well.

No company has offered a timeline for when its drug might be used more widely to treat COVID-19. This isnt an easy thing to estimate.

After laboratory and animal testing, drugs have to pass through several clinical trial stages before they can be approved for widespread use in people.

Its also difficult to speed things up, because scientists have to enroll enough people in each stage to have useful results. They also have to wait long enough to see whether there are harmful side effects of the drug.

However, drugs can sometimes be given to people outside a clinical trial through the Food and Drug Administrations compassionate use program. For this to happen, people must have an immediately life-threatening condition or serious disease or condition.

Doctors at the University of California, Davis were able to secure this type of approval for a woman with severe COVID-19 to receive remdesivir. They report that shes now doing well.

Many will take this as a sign that the drug works. But because the drug was given outside of a clinical trial to just one person, its not possible to know for certain. Also, other people may not have the same response to the drug.

A vaccine is designed to protect people before theyre exposed to a virus in this case, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A vaccine basically trains the immune system to recognize and attack the virus when it encounters it.

Vaccines protect both the person whos vaccinated and the community. People who are vaccinated cant become infected with a virus, which means they cant pass it to others. This is known as herd immunity.

Many groups are working on potential vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, with several backed by the nonprofit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Several of these groups started their work shortly after Chinese scientists shared the genetic sequence of the virus. These include:

Advances in genetic sequencing and other technological developments have sped up some of the earlier laboratory work for vaccine development.

However, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters last week that a vaccine wont be available for widespread use for at least another 12 to 18 months.

This is the timeline to complete the phase III clinical studies. Theres no guarantee that the vaccine candidates will work.

Theres a lot of uncertainty with vaccine development, Lee said. Naturally, you have to make sure the vaccine is safe. But you also have to make sure the vaccine will elicit enough of an immune response.

Like drugs, potential vaccines have to pass through the same clinical trial stages. This is especially important when it comes to safety, even during a pandemic.

The publics willingness to back quarantines and other public-health measures to slow spread tends to correlate with how much people trust the governments health advice, Shibo Jiang, a virologist at Fudan University in China, wrote in the journal Nature.

A rush into potentially risky vaccines and therapies will betray that trust and discourage work to develop better assessments, he said.

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Where We're at with Vaccines and Treatments for COVID-19 - Healthline