DUBLIN – Sanofi SA and Glaxosmithkline plc are lending their considerable weight to the urgent global effort to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 by teaming up to develop an adjuvanted recombinant subunit vaccine that will employ technologies from each company. Paris-based Sanofi is contributing its recombinant spike protein antigen and its baculovirus expression system, which is also the basis of its U.S.-licensed influenza vaccine Flublok. London-based GSK is contributing its pandemic adjuvant technology.
LONDON – Companies represented in the expert group brought together by the World Health Organization (WHO) to work on the development of COVID-19 vaccines have signed a pledge to strengthen collaboration and sharing of data.
In order to redirect health care resources and protect patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, many drug companies have paused enrollment in some or all of their ongoing clinical trials. But patients still in the studies need to be followed for safety and efficacy, creating challenges for the industry.
A new, worldwide coalition of plasma companies seeking to develop and deliver a hyperimmune immunoglobulin therapy for fighting COVID-19 takes the view that many hands make light work.
DUBLIN – At the best of times, drug development is, of course, a complex problem. It is all the more demanding still in the middle of a pandemic, when the threat to human life is increasing exponentially, and health care systems are buckling under an extraordinary burden. Optimizing the development of drugs and vaccines in order to quickly generate high-quality evidence of their safety and efficacy is, therefore, a critical task, but an online webinar organized by the drug development consultants Certara LP, in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, suggested that, at this stage of the crisis, that lesson has yet to be absorbed.
“Vaccines, obviously, are the ultimate solution for pandemics,” Rino Rappuoli told BioWorld. They have, he added, “already eliminated a lot of pandemic threats – smallpox, influenza, poliomyelitis.” And the road to normalcy from the current pandemic, or any pandemic, is likely to be open only once there is a vaccine.
Novavax Inc., one of the first biopharma companies to reveal its efforts to develop a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in January, has identified a prefusion protein for testing in an Australian phase I trial, slated to start in mid-May.
LONDON – An unseemly row has broken out at the heart of EU science, with Mauro Ferrari, head of the European Research Council (ERC), accusing the European Commission of failing to coordinate and fund R&D needed to combat COVID-19.
PERTH, Australia – Australian stem cell therapy company Mesoblast Ltd. announced that the FDA gave it the green light to test its allogeneic mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) product candidate remestemcel-L in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) caused by coronavirus (COVID-19). “We’re going to be evaluating whether an injection of our cells intravenously can tone down the immune system just enough so it gets rid of the virus but doesn’t destroy your lungs at the same time,” Mesoblast CEO Silviu Itescu told BioWorld.
COVID-19 has disrupted science in the way it has disrupted everything else. In the short term, universities have largely closed shop as a way to maximize social distancing, and lots of science – or at least, lots of bench work – is not getting done.
