Repurposing existing drugs to treat COVID-19 will allow scientists to tackle the pandemic more rapidly than by developing a vaccine, researchers claim. 

Any effective vaccine will take over a year to be developed and manufactured in enough quantities to tackle the coronavirus pandemic on a large scale, the team argued.

Instead, a multi-pronged approach will be needed to identify drugs that are effective in combating the infection that can be more readily put to widespread use.

'There are a lot of vaccines being developed around the world, which we hope will be successful,' said paper author and molecular pharmacologist Steve Alexander of the University of Nottingham.

Nevertheless, he added: 'It's still going to take a long time before those vaccines are shown to be effective and can be manufactured at the scale needed to make an impact.

'Some of the vaccines may not work, so the more drugs that can be tested and the more we know about the targets, the more likely we are to get something which is effective.'