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Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca said Thursday that a Covid-19 vaccine could still be available by the end of the year, despite a randomized clinical trial being paused.
“We could still have a vaccine by the end of this year, early next year,” Chief Executive Officer of the UK-based company Pascal Soriot said in comments at a press event.
AstraZeneca announced on Wednesday that it had “voluntarily stopped” its trial of a vaccine developed in conjunction with Oxford University after a UK volunteer developed an unexplained illness.
An independent committee was drafted to review the safety, but the company said it was a “routine action” designed to maintain the integrity of the trials.
“This committee will guide us as to when trials could restart, so that we can continue our work at the earliest opportunity,” Soriot said in a statement.
AstraZeneca’s candidate vaccine is one of nine worldwide currently in late-stage phase 3 human trials.
In the US, the company began enrolling 30,000 volunteers at dozens of sites on August 31, and smaller groups are being tested in Brazil and other parts of South America.
The vaccine, called AZD1222, uses a weakened version of a common cold-causing adenovirus designed to encode the spike protein that the new coronavirus uses to invade cells.
After vaccination, this protein is produced within the human body, which prepares the immune system to attack the coronavirus if the person is subsequently infected.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said the development was “a good wake-up call … that there are ups and downs in research.”
“We don’t need to get too discouraged because these things happen,” WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan told a virtual press conference.
The director of the UK scientific research charity Wellcome Trust, Jeremy Farrar, said there are often pauses in vaccine trials.
He told BBC radio in an interview that he demonstrated the importance of conducting vaccine trials properly, with independent oversight and the involvement of the regulator.
“In the end, the public must have absolute confidence that these vaccines are safe and, of course, effective, and in the end, hopefully, the pandemic will be ended,” he added.
Britain’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, said on Wednesday that similar events should be expected, but that progress on vaccines and therapies was generally positive.
“Some will read this year in terms of efficacy and safety,” he told a news conference in Downing Street.
“And I think there is a reasonable chance that … we can think about the possibility of vaccination next year at some point at higher levels.”
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the hiatus “was not necessarily” a setback, and said a similar hiatus occurred recently, but “was resolved without a problem”.
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