NEW DELHI: As scientists across the world work frantically to find a vaccine against COVID-19, which continues its rapid global spread, all eyes are on US-based company Moderna’s encouraging early results on a small group of healthy volunteers.
Cautioning that a vaccine is still months, maybe even a year away, experts said the US-based biotechnology firm‘s results have propelled it to a pole position in the race of 118.
Eight candidate vaccines for COVID-19 are in the clinical evaluation, while 110 are in the preclinical stage, according to the WHO’s latest draft landscape. Preclinical development is a stage of research during which important feasibility, iterative testing and drug safety data are collected, while clinical trials are research studies performed on people.
Early data from its vaccine candidate “mRNA-1273” showed it produced protective antibodies in a group of eight healthy volunteers, Moderna said.
The other closely watched COVID-19 vaccine is the one being developed by scientists at Oxford University. It appears protective in a small study of six monkeys, promising findings that led to the start of human trials late last month.
“Because Moderna’s is the only vaccine having demonstrated any kind of immunologic response in the COVID-19 field, we would consider this to be the leading candidate,” said Michael Breen, associate director, Infectious Disease, at GlobalData, a UK-based data analytics and consulting company.
“Of the vaccines in human trials, only two have demonstrated any kind of effectiveness,” Breen said, noting that the Moderna study proves that the platform can lead to the production of antibodies against a given virus.
Moderna on Monday announced positive interim clinical data of mRNA-1273, from the Phase 1 study led by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The data comes from eight people who took part in a 45-subject safety trial that kicked off in March.
The study showed the vaccine was safe and all study participants produced antibodies against the virus, according to the company. (AGENCIES)
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