European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was optimistic that a coronavirus vaccine would be ready by this fall | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images Von der Leyen hopes for vaccine by ‘autumn,’ defying expert predictions Public health officials predict it will take a year or more.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the regulatory process for vaccines could be sped up as she defended a suggestion that a shot against coronavirus could be on the market “before autumn.”

That timeline is much faster than what's foreseen by public health authorities, who expect another year to 18 months for an immunization to be available to the general public.

Von der Leyen earlier on Tuesday expressed optimism following talks with CureVac, a biotech company working on a coronavirus vaccine. The EU has offered the company €80 million in financial backing. “I hope that with this support, we can have a vaccine on the market, perhaps before autumn,” she said.

Vaccines, like all medicines, need to undergo a series of clinical trials before authorities decide if they can be sold. Von der Leyen, a trained medical doctor, expressed confidence that in this case the normal procedures could be fast-tracked.

"As we are in a severe crisis, we all see that we are able to speed up any of the processes that are slow normally and take a lot of time and are very bureaucratic," she told a later press conference.

Even though officials in both the U.S. and Europe have pledged to move as quickly as possible, they've consistently cautioned that a vaccine won't be ready to jab in people's arms in 2020.

“I still believe we will be lucky to get a vaccine for mass use in a year from the start of this," Patrick Vallance, the U.K.'s chief scientific adviser, told reporters Tuesday. "That would be extraordinary."

Von der Leyen said her autumn aspirations came from CureVac itself. “They are highly specialized in this field, and it's their prediction that they might be able, towards fall, to have the possibility to have a vaccine that is fighting coronavirus,” she said.

In an interview with German media site Sport1 published Monday, CureVac majority investor Dietmar Hopp said timing depends on the German national regulator. However, he added, the shot “ought to be available in autumn” in case the virus comes back after the summer.

On Tuesday, Thorsten Schüller, a CureVac spokesman, told POLITICO that going through all three phases of the clinical trials process normally takes “years," but he declined to respond to von der Leyen’s predicted timeline.

Given the clamor for a coronavirus vaccine, he added, “We assume that the process will be shortened. This depends on the authorities.”

CureVac is at the center of a German-U.S. dispute, with Berlin accusing U.S. President Donald Trump of trying to poach the company and have its vaccines produced exclusively for the U.S. American officials have rejected reports about Trump's grab for vaccine exclusivity as “wildly overplayed.” The company echoed that denial on Tuesday.

Trump has been frequently contradicted by his government’s public health experts after expressing hope that a coronavirus vaccine would be ready within months. The director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said a vaccine won't be ready for “a year to a year and a half," even though "this is the fastest we have ever gone from a sequence of a virus to a trial."

Likewise, the European Medicines Agency is ready to evaluate vaccines "within the shortest possible timelines," the EU drug regulator's deputy executive director, Noël Wathion, told health ministers on March 6. Early trials won't start before April or May, Wathion said.

Phase 1 trials study whether the vaccine is safe and has any impact in a small number of people. Subsequent phases of trials would study the shot in more people to see whether it really works; what the right dosage is; and what longer-term effects it has. Potential coronavirus vaccines won't be ready for large-scale clinical studies until "several months from now," Wathion said.

Von der Leyen pointed to the reports that the U.S. had tried to woo CureVac as evidence "that they [the company] are the frontrunner in the research."

However, with multiple vaccines in development around the globe, CureVac's isn't the furthest along. On Monday, a Phase 1 trial began in the U.S. as the first volunteer received an injection of an experimental vaccine by the drugmaker Moderna.

A CureVac official told reporters Tuesday that the company aims to start Phase 1 testing by "early summer."

Carmen Paun, Hans von der Burchard and David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.