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On Friday, Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced that their vaccine candidate is not effective enough in the elderly. Therefore, they have decided to continue developing the vaccine and then start new test studies.
This is a severe setback for vaccine manufacturers, who previously expected to have the vaccine on the market by June 2021. They now believe that the vaccine can be expected to be on the market by the end of 2021 at the earliest.
Tough competition
The European Commission has concluded framework agreements for the delivery of vaccines from several companies, including Sanofi and GSK, which also include Norway. The candidate vaccine is also one of the candidates included in the US vaccination program Operation Warp Speed.
– There were high expectations for the vaccine candidate for Sanofi and GSK. The problem with the candidate vaccine was that they found that it did not give a good enough immune response in the elderly and therefore they must now go back and conduct further studies, says medical director Steinar Madsen of the Norwegian Agency for Medicines in Dagbladet.
Madsen believes that more vaccine manufacturers will eventually give up.
– There are many who are now trying to develop vaccines, and at this time it is impossible to know how many of them will eventually be approved. Over time, more people will give up, as the Australian CSL and the University of Queensland have done with their vaccine candidate, says Madsen, continuing:
– This is partly due to the fact that vaccine candidates who can report very good results are putting pressure on other candidates, who want to match these results.
Optimistic
Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is at the forefront of the vaccine race. Both the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States have approved the vaccine for use against covid-19. The EU is expected to complete the approval process for the Pfizer vaccine by the end of December.
The EU has also started approval processes for the candidate vaccines from Moderna, AstraZeneca and Janssen (also known as Johnson & Johnson journaln.anm.).
– One of the most interesting things about this pandemic is that we have now developed vaccines that are based on new technology. This opens the door for important advances related to disease treatment and prevention, and shows promise with respect to new pandemics, new diseases, and antibiotic resistance, Madsen says.
Traditional
The candidates for AstraZeneca and Janssen are the so-called viral vector vaccines, while the candidates for Pfizer and Moderna are the so-called mRNA vaccines, which are considered a relatively new technology. Sanofi and the GSK vaccine candidate, on the other hand, is a protein-based vaccine.
– The Sanofi and GSK candidate vaccine is a protein vaccine, which is the most traditional type of vaccine. Protein vaccines are based on the proteins of the virus and are intended to create an immune response against viral proteins, such as the spike protein of the coronavirus, Madsen says.
