[ad_1]
During the past week, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer (with BioNTech) and the biotechnology company Moderna announced in the United States very promising preliminary results of their two vaccines against the coronavirus, overshadowing the efforts of many other research centers and companies. pharmaceutical products. Among them is the British company AstraZeneca which, with its experimental vaccine developed in collaboration with the University of Oxford, had attracted a great deal of media attention in recent months and which now seems to have disappeared a bit in the so-called ‘race for vaccine”.
The fact that less is said about him does not imply that the British project is ruined, quite the contrary. AstraZeneca continues the trial and according to those responsible it could publish a first series of results in a few weeks: if it is positive, it could soon obtain an authorization to start the distribution of the vaccine, perhaps before Pfizer and Moderna.
AstraZeneca was one of the first pharmaceutical companies to initiate research and trials of a coronavirus vaccine, providing resources and collaboration to a research group at the University of Oxford. His vaccine was made from one of the viruses that cause the common cold in chimpanzees. Simplifying: The researchers transferred the genetic material of the protein that the coronavirus uses to bind to cells and replicate, inserting it into the virus obtained from chimpanzees and rendering it harmless to humans. In this way, the immune system learns to attack the protein, so that it can also cope with any infection caused by the actual coronavirus.
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna experimental vaccines use the same protein principle to be recognized safely by the immune system, but they do so by taking advantage of a different solution based on the use of artificial genetic material (mRNA). The fact that this solution was effective, and more than expected, in the first results of their respective final tests, could also be good news for AstraZeneca.
Before the summer, the AstraZeneca vaccine had been shown to be effective in preventing coronavirus infections in monkeys. The researchers then began the first two stages of experimentation with volunteers, without detecting particular adverse events derived from the administration of the vaccine. Subsequently, more clinical trials were started in England, India, Brazil, South Africa and the United States.
However, in September AstraZeneca had to suspend the global clinical trial to find out the causes of an adverse effect, severe inflammation, that had affected one of the volunteers. The trial resumed after about a week and now continues in the last phase (of 3), dedicated to verifying the efficacy of the vaccine in thousands of volunteers.
Pfizer and Moderna are also in the step 3 of their respective vaccines, but nonetheless provided a first set of experimental data on clinical trials, reporting an efficacy of 90 percent in the case of Pfizer and 94.5 percent in the case of Moderna. They did so with press releases and without providing many other data, which could still vary in the last part of the step 3, by collecting additional information on the health conditions of the participants in their trials.
AstraZeneca is expected to release a first preliminary data set in the coming weeks, while its CEO expects that step 3 It could end in the last weeks of December. If the preliminary data were encouraging, both from an efficacy and safety point of view, AstraZeneca could obtain an emergency authorization for the use of its vaccine in some countries, distributing the first million doses by the end of the year. .
In August, the European Union signed an agreement with AstraZeneca to supply approximately 400 million doses, should clinical trials be successful. The United States has also reserved 300 million doses, the purchase of which will be confirmed only when there are sufficient elements to define the vaccine as effective and safe. AstraZeneca expects to produce around 2 billion doses in one year, which should be enough to meet the commitments made so far.
The AstraZeneca vaccine working principle has been in use for some time and has yielded several satisfactory results, compared to the mRNA-based one from Pfizer and Moderna, hitherto never licensed for large-scale use in vaccines. For the British company it could be an advantage, which will add to the greater convenience in the storage and distribution of doses, which do not require to be stored at extremely low temperatures as is the case with the Pfizer vaccine. However, much will depend on the efficacy levels found during phase 3 and whether or not they will approach those obtained by Pfizer and Moderna.
[ad_2]
