The drugmakers competing fiercely for the launch of a COVID-19 vaccine and its effectiveness based on its early data are also engrossed in meeting the targets set by the governments of their respective country.
The first results to determine the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine could come by mid-September from AstraZeneca Plc, according to Airfinity Ltd., an analytics company that tracks drug trials.
Read on to find out more…
Which Drugmakers are Competing For Coming Up With the COVID-19 Vaccine?
AstraZeneca Plc, a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical, and biopharmaceutical company has committed to providing as many as 30 million doses to the U.K. by the end of the month.
Airfinity said the USA’s Moderna Inc. and the US-German partnership of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE may also come up with their research data ahead of an important Food and Drug Administration meeting on vaccines scheduled for October 22.
According to LiveMint’s report, China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd. could have preliminary results shortly after the meeting.
The preliminary results are snapshots taken before the completion of the study with only a fraction of the data. They are just a small part of the entire study.
Airfinity Chief Executive Officer Rasmus Bech Hansent, “The first results should be enough to give us a very good idea of where we’re heading. They are moving faster than one could have anticipated.”
What Is the Forecast of COVID-19 Vaccines?
World Health Organization (WHO) has cautioned countries against approving a vaccine in a hurry before assessing completely the vaccine’s risks and benefits. According to WHO, any vaccine should be shown to be effective in at least half the people who get it to gain clearance.
The analysis carried out by Airfinity is based on publicly available data on trial enrollment and design, together with infection rates in places where patients are enrolled.
Vaccine trials are conducted on relatively healthy people, unlike drug trials. So far, each of these experimental vaccines has already shown promise in smaller trials designed to flag any serious safety concerns and show whether candidates can spur some response from the immune system, said the report.
Although the effectiveness of the vaccine in the real world will determine on a bigger study which will require tens of thousands of participants, compared to the few hundred people who took the vaccines in early-stage trials.
Airfinity said that the drugmakers request regulatory approval only after the arrival of the final results of the trials.
Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Los Angeles Times, overwhelmingly positive interim results could lead to studies being stopped early and the vaccines being rushed to the public.
It will be important to follow participants in the trials long enough to see whether serious side effects emerge, WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan said on Monday. A premature approval would make it hard to continue studying the vaccine in randomized trials, she added.
Swaminathan warning that an ‘inadequately studied’ vaccine could present either safety problems or ‘low efficacy, thereby not doing the job of bringing an end to this pandemic’, said, “What’s going to be really important, I think, is to make decisions based on science.”
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