The Modern Covid-19 vaccine, which the company recently found to be 94 percent effective, causes the human immune system to produce potent antibodies that last for at least three months, a study showed Thursday.
Researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which co-developed the drug, studied the immune responses of 34 adult participants, young and old, from the first stage of a clinical trial.
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, they said that antibodies, which prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from invading human cells, “decreased slightly over time, as expected, but remained elevated in all participants 3 months later. of the booster dose. vaccination.”
The vaccine, called mRNA-1273, is given in two injections 28 days apart.
Although the amount of antibodies in the study subjects decreased over time, it is not necessarily a cause for concern.
NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and other experts have said the immune system is very likely to remember the virus if it is re-exposed later on and then produces new antibodies.
It is encouraging that the study showed that the vaccine activated a certain type of immune cell that should help in the so-called memory response, but only a longer-term study will confirm whether this is indeed the case.
“The positives from the study include evidence that a relatively strong antibody response remains 90 days after the second dose of the vaccine,” said virologist Benjamin Neuman, a virologist at Texas A & M University-Texarkana.
“The amount of antibodies produced by the vaccine was higher in younger patients than in older patients, but reasonably strong immune responses were still seen even in patients up to 70 years of age.”
The Moderna vaccine will be reviewed by an advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on December 17, and could receive the green light for emergency approval shortly thereafter.
Like another vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech, it is based on a new technology that uses genetic material in the form of mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid).
The mRNA is encased in a lipid molecule and is injected into the arm, where it causes cells inside our muscles to build a coronavirus surface protein.
This tricks the immune system into believing that it has been infected with a microbe and trains it to build the correct type of antibodies for when it encounters the real virus.
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