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© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: In this illustration, a test tube labeled with the word Vaccine is seen in front of the AstraZeneca logo.
By Kate Kelland and Alistair Smout
LONDON (Reuters) – AstraZeneca (NYSE 🙂 and Oxford University’s potential COVID-19 vaccine produced a strong immune response in older adults, data released Thursday showed, and researchers hope to release the results of the late stage rehearsal for Christmas.
The data, reported in part last month but published in its entirety in The Lancet medical journal on Thursday, suggests that people over the age of 70, who are at increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19, could develop a solid immunity.
“The robust antibody and T-cell responses seen in older people in our study are encouraging,” said Maheshi Ramasamy, consultant and co-principal investigator for the Oxford Vaccine Group.
“We hope this means that our vaccine helps protect some of the most vulnerable people in society, but more research will be needed before we can be sure.”
Late-stage or Phase III trials are underway to confirm the findings, the researchers said, and to test whether the vaccine protects against SARS-CoV-2 infection in a wide range of people, including people with underlying health conditions. .
The results of those trials should definitely be known before Christmas, said Oxford Vaccine Group director Andrew Pollard, adding that it was too early to know if the vaccine works to prevent COVID-19 disease and how well it works.
“We are still waiting to get to the point where we can do the analysis to determine how well the vaccine can protect people, and we are getting closer to that,” he told reporters.
“We are optimistic that we will be able to do that before Christmas, and obviously we will share it with you as soon as we can at that time.”
The Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine candidate, named AZD1222 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, had been among the pioneers in global efforts to develop vaccines to protect against infection with the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2.
But rival drug makers Pfizer Inc (N :), BioNTech (F 🙂 and Modern Inc (O 🙂 has made progress in the past 10 days, publishing late-stage COVID-19 vaccine trial data showing efficacy of more than 90%.
“We’re not in a rush. We and it’s not a competition with the other developers,” said Oxford’s Pollard, adding that AstraZeneca would publish the headline efficacy data before they were published in an academic journal.
The University of Oxford has set a target of 53 infections to begin interim analysis of the results of its late-stage trials, although “many cases” in its trial clusters in Great Britain, South Africa and Brazil mean that the exact number of Reported infections could differ.
Unlike Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna injections, which use a new technology known as messenger RNA (mRNA), AstraZeneca’s is a viral vector vaccine made from a weakened version of a common cold virus found in chimpanzees.
The phase II trial published in The Lancet involved a total of 560 healthy volunteers, with 160 aged 18 to 55, 160 aged 56 to 69 and 240 aged 70 and over.
Volunteers received two doses of the vaccine or a placebo, and no serious side effects related to the AZD1222 vaccine were reported, the researchers said.
AstraZeneca (L 🙂 has signed various supply and manufacturing agreements with companies and governments around the world.
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