A safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine may be available by the end of the year or early next year, as will the supplies needed to deliver and administer hundreds of millions of doses. That’s the message five biopharma executives delivered to a House subcommittee July 21 as they updated U.S. lawmakers on the progress their companies are making on the vaccine front.
LONDON – There were encouraging results from trials of three COVID-19 vaccines on July 20, with Astrazeneca plc, Biontech SE/Pfizer Inc. and Cansino Biologics Inc. all reporting T-cell responses in ongoing phase I/II studies of their respective products.
LONDON – Glaxosmithkline plc (GSK) is putting £130 million (US$164.3 million) into one of the leading COVID-19 vaccines developers, Curevac AG, acquiring a 10% stake, and will also invest £104 million cash up front to fund research and development of the company’s mRNA vaccines.
LONDON – From the start of the pandemic antibodies have been the main focus of attempts to understand the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and ascertain what it will take for vaccines to be protective.
LONDON – Pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers working on COVID-19 vaccines are being targeted by Russian state-sponsored hackers, according to the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). The U.K. view is endorsed by the U.S. National Security Agency and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, and the three agencies have issued a joint statement advising companies how to protect against these attacks.
In its first fully virtual markup session, the House Energy and Commerce Committee Wednesday set aside politics to approve a bill that would make the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) a better emergency resource – at least for the next few years.
An editorial yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) marveled that “the world has now witnessed the compression of six years of work into six months,” and went on to ask the question that’s on everyone’s pandemic-wrenched mind: “Can the vaccine multiverse do it again, leading to a reality of a safe, efficacious COVID-19 vaccine for the most vulnerable in the next six [months]?”
CAJICA, Colombia, and BEIJING – Last week Sinovac Biotech Ltd., of Beijing, announced the approval by Anvisa, the Brazilian health care surveillance agency, to start phase III trials to test the efficacy and safety of its inactivated COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Sinovac Life Sciences, a subsidiary of the Chinese company, in the Latin American country.
Research focused on finding viable solutions to counter the COVID-19 pandemic continues at an explosive pace with a total of 588 potential therapeutics and vaccines at the forefront of scientific efforts launched by industry, academia and government.
The question of prices for a COVID-19 vaccine have raged in recent days. Gary Disbrow, acting director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), told members of a Senate committee that vaccines developed with the help of taxpayer funding will come with an appropriate reduction in price. However, CDC Director Robert Redfield emphasized that the cold-chain distribution system for those products requires the same kind of at-risk investment that is used for vaccine development.
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