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AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford are still in the race to bring the first Covid-19 vaccine to market.
The UK-based pharmaceutical company announced today that its vaccine candidate, developed in partnership with Oxford, is approximately 70% effective in preventing Covid-19 infection two weeks or more after the second dose, with side effects. limited. The vaccine candidate is the third with preliminary data from clinical trials, behind the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna candidates.
So far, 131 of the nearly 14,000 registered participants have developed Covid-19, though none of the cases have been serious, and AstraZeneca says it plans to apply for regulatory clearance and a peer-reviewed publication imminently, even as trials continue. up to 60,000 registered global participants.
Although the efficacy results are lower than the vaccine candidates from Pfizer and Moderna, which have reported efficacy of 90% or more, the AstraZeneca candidate has something the other candidates do not: the ability to be shipped and stored with an infrastructure that already exists. across the globe.
AstraZeneca vaccine should be stored between 2 ° C and 8 ° C (36 ° F to 46 ° F), which is within the range of normal refrigerators. “It can be distributed around the world using the normal immunization delivery system,” Andrew Pollard, the trial’s lead investigator, said during a news conference. “And so our goal … to make sure that we have a vaccine that is accessible everywhere, I think we’ve really done it.”
Both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s candidate vaccines require specialized ultra-cold freezers that can store vaccines at -70 ° C (-94 ° F) and -20 ° C (-4 ° F), respectively. Public health officials are already concerned that these freezers are not accessible to rural areas and poorer countries. Specialized equipment is necessary due to the nature of your vaccine: both use a messenger RNA (mRNA) to instruct the body to make its own models of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, a hallmark of the virus structure. , which triggers B-cells to produce antibodies against it. This mRNA, which is delivered in lipid nanoparticles, needs to stay cooler to maintain its integrity. Drug makers have never brought an mRNA vaccine to market, in part because it was so difficult to figure out how to effectively deliver it to the body.
However, the AstraZeneca candidate uses a tried and true vaccine platform called a viral vector. In this case, he uses a weakened version of an adenovirus, which causes a common cold in chimpanzees. This virus cannot make humans sick, it cannot even replicate in the body. Instead of its usual viral genetic material, scientists have replaced it with genetic material from the same SARS-CoV-2 spike protein as the mRNA vaccine candidates. Our cells go ahead and replicate the spike protein, which then spurs our B cells into action to produce antibodies. So far, there are already vaccines for Ebola, tuberculosis and MERS that use this same platform.
In addition to being easier to store, the AstraZeneca vaccine should also be cheaper. The company has stated that its vaccine should cost roughly $ 6 to $ 8 for both doses, compared to about $ 40 for Pfizer and $ 50 for Moderna, according to The Guardian. It plans to produce about 3 billion doses of the vaccine in 2021.
