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Merck, one of the world’s leading vaccine manufacturers, is finishing development on its Covid-19 vaccine after its two candidates failed to elicit immune responses as strong as those created by injections that are already available.
The US pharmaceutical company also said Monday that its phase 1 trials showed that the response of the participants was not as robust as the immune response seen in recovered Covid-19 patients. There were no major security issues.
Merck shares fell 1.8 percent to $ 79.51 in premarket trading in New York as the company said it would post an unspecified charge in the fourth quarter.
Dean Li, president of Merck Research Laboratories, said the company remained “steadfast in our commitment to contribute to the global effort to ease the burden of this pandemic on patients, healthcare systems and communities.”
Merck was slow to announce its entry into the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, despite previous successes in vaccines. Instead, two of the first injections available have been developed by companies that previously had no vaccine products on the market: BioNTech and Moderna.
Before Covid-19, Merck had developed a mumps vaccine in what was then a record four years, created the first Ebola vaccine to be approved by a US regulator, and launched the first vaccine designed to prevent cervical cancer. .
Merck will now focus on developing drugs to treat Covid-19. The company has an agreement with the US government worth up to $ 356 million to sell a drug to treat the inflammatory response of critically ill Covid-19 patients if it receives an emergency use authorization.
The second drug is an antiviral in phase 2/3 of clinical trials, which is being developed with Ridgeback Bio. It could be the first oral therapy that patients could take outside of the hospital.
Merck’s abandonment of its two experimental vaccines against Covid-19 is also a severe blow to France because one of them, known as V591, was initially developed by the Institut Pasteur, the country’s leading biomedical research institution. The vaccine delivered a weakened form of the Sars-Cov-2 virus that causes Covid-19, using a measles vaccine as the delivery mechanism. The scientists hoped this would make manufacturing easier and cheaper, since there are already many facilities to make measles vaccines.
The failure of the Pasteur vaccine also means that France remains without its own national producer, prompting some politicians and public health experts to lament the weakness of the country’s pharmaceutical sector and to envy the UK, Germany and the US. .
Sanofi, the nation’s leading pharmaceutical company and one of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers, suffered a major setback in December when its experimental Covid-19 vaccine, developed in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline, failed phase 2 trials due to a dosing error. , forcing him to repeat the study.
The delay means that Sanofi is unlikely to be able to market a vaccine until the end of this year at the earliest. It is now studying whether it can act as a contract manufacturer for rival producers.
Geoffrey Porges, an analyst at SVB Leerink, said it was not “encouraging” that two of the four largest vaccine companies, GSK and Merck, were “effectively out of the Covid race.” “This news makes the results of Johnson & Johnson and Novavax even more important,” he added.
