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Only a week has passed since Biontech and its partner Pfizer, the first competitors in the race for a vaccine against the novel coronavirus, presented promising interim results of their effectiveness study. This Monday, the American biotechnology group Moderna released an intermediate analysis of its vaccine. As the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company reports, the new vaccine is 94.5 percent effective according to the interim report, and is therefore somewhat better than competitor Biontech’s vaccine.
Moderna only announced in late October that the last of the 30,000 participants in the comprehensive efficacy study, the so-called COVE study, had received the first of two vaccines. The results presented now are based on the first 95 cases of Covid 19 disease within two weeks of the second vaccination. Of these, 90 cases occurred in the placebo group that had only received a sham vaccine. Eleven of these patients became seriously ill. In the group actually vaccinated there were five diseases, according to the company there was no serious clinical picture.
Moderna originally wanted to do the first analysis after 53 cases, but apparently the number of illnesses in the unvaccinated placebo group was increasing faster than expected. The study of the American company is of great interest because it includes an unusually high number of elderly and previously ill people. You are at particularly high risk of developing severe Covid-19 and even dying. However, the company has not yet submitted an age analysis of the interim results.
However, experts are confident that the vaccine is well tolerated based on available data on side effects and appears to be very effective. “This is the first study to report severe cases as well,” says pharmacoepidemiologist Stephen Evans of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “And while the results are still uncertain, the absence of severe cases in the vaccine group and the occurrence of eleven such severe diseases in the placebo group is very strong evidence that the vaccine prevents both mild and severe courses. “.
Evans also highlights another advantage of the Moderna vaccine: the vaccine, like Biontech’s, is based on the so-called RNA platform. This means that it consists of small pieces of code that encode the enriched protein of the virus and that are assembled by the cells of the vaccinated body to form this protein. Then, the immune system develops a defense reaction and an immune memory against this protein. The Biontech vaccine, however, must be kept in a constant cold chain at minus 70 degrees before use. Moderna’s vaccine is apparently more stable and therefore less demanding due to synthetic RNA amplification. “Although you need a good commercial freezer for maximum shelf life, a typical refrigerator is enough for 30 days,” says Evans. The vaccine is stable even for twelve hours at room temperature.
For the US market in particular, which should receive the first 20 million doses for ten million people before the end of the year in the event of an emergency approval, the logistical requirements of the vaccine are crucial. Many rural hospitals do not have freezers that can cool down to minus 70 degrees Celsius. Moderna has already signed a large number of international treaties, currently there is no agreement with the European Union. Like Biontech and Pfizer, Moderna intends to apply for emergency approval from the US Medicines Agency in the coming weeks.
