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The COVID-19 vaccine being developed by pharmaceutical groups Sanofi and GSK will not be ready in the early second half of 2021 as expected and will be postponed until at least the fourth quarter.
In a statement, the French group Sanofi and the British GSK explained this postponement with the “insufficient response” that has been observed among the elderly during the intermediate phase I / II studies that are being carried out.
In the note, the group specified that The results obtained showed an immune response in adults aged 18 to 49 years. “comparable to that of patients who recovered from a covid-19 infection, but a weak immune response among older adults. “
The laboratories consider that this is due “to an insufficient concentration of antigen”.
Therefore, the group wants to “adjust the antigen concentration to obtain a high immune response in all age groups”.
Taking these facts into account, Sanofi and GSK will launch a phase IIb study that should begin next February and, if the results are positive, it will move to phase III (involving several tens of thousands of people) “in the second quarter. . 2021 “.
“The formulation of the product is not satisfactory. It is important to optimize it, it may take a little longer,” Thomas Triomphe, vice president of vaccines at Sanofi, told the French news agency AFP.
Sanofi, which is developing the vaccine together with GSK, which supplies its adjuvant, had recently started the last phase of human trials before approval by the authorities (“phase 3”).
The French pharmaceutical giant, one of the world’s leading vaccine producers, expected to be able to produce 1 billion doses by 2021.
On November 9, US pharmaceutical multinational Pfizer and German biotechnology partner BioNTech announced that their experimental vaccine for COVID-19 was 90% effective, based on analysis of 94 COVID-19 cases.
More recently, the American biotechnology company Moderna indicated that its candidate vaccine is 94.5% effective in preventing covid-19, taking into account the analysis of 95 cases.
Russia also announced that its Sputnik V vaccine against covid-19, developed by the Gamaleya National Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, is 95% effective, according to preliminary results.
The first batch of Sputnik V for the foreign market will reach people in January 2021 based on the agreements already signed with foreign partners.
The AstraZeneca laboratory and the University of Oxford also announced that their vaccine has an average efficacy rate of 70 percent.
On Tuesday, the UK began making the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine available, kicking off a global immunization program that should be stepped up as more sera are approved.
The first person in the UK to receive the covid-19 vaccine, developed by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, was a 90-year-old woman.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 1,570,398 deaths as a result of more than 68.8 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report by the French agency AFP.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
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