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One of the world’s leading Covid-19 experimental vaccines elicits an immune response in both older and young adults, raising hopes of emerging from the obscurity and economic destruction wrought by the new coronavirus.
The vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford, also triggers lower adverse responses among older people, British pharmacist AstraZeneca, which is helping to make the vaccine, said on Monday.
A vaccine that works is seen as a game changer in the battle against the coronavirus, which has killed more than 1.15 million people, shut down swaths of the world economy and turned the normal lives of billions upside down. of people.
“It is encouraging to see that immunogenicity responses were similar between older and younger adults and that reactogenicity was lower in older adults, where the severity of Covid-19 disease is greatest,” said an AstraZeneca spokesperson.
“The results further build the body of evidence for AZD1222’s safety and immunogenicity,” the spokesperson said, referring to the technical name of the vaccine.
AstraZeneca did not provide details of the data behind the statement or say when it would release the long-awaited phase 3 phase 3 data that would show whether the vaccine works well enough in large-scale trials for it to be approved.
The vaccine is expected to be one of the first from Big Pharma to gain regulatory approval, along with one from Pfizer and BioNTech.
The news that older people get an immune response from the vaccine is positive because the immune system weakens with age and older people are most at risk of dying from the virus.
If it works, a vaccine would allow the world to return to normal after the pandemic.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said a vaccine was not ready yet, but that he was preparing logistics for a possible launch, mainly in the first half of 2021.
When asked if some people could get a vaccine this year, he told the BBC: “I don’t rule that out, but that is not my central expectation.”
Work on the Oxford vaccine began in January. Called AZD1222 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, the viral vector vaccine is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus that causes infections in chimpanzees.
Immunogenicity blood tests carried out on a subset of older participants echo data published in July that showed the vaccine elicited “robust immune responses” in a group of healthy adults ages 18 to 55, reported the Financial Times previously.
“We need to look at the data before concluding that the responses were ‘similar’,” said Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
He said reactogenicity, the common side effects of vaccines, such as arm pain and redness, was “often, but not always” associated with the immunogenicity of a vaccine.
“Studies done early in the development of a vaccine will result in choosing a dose that doesn’t cause too much reactogenicity,” he said.
AstraZeneca has signed several supply and manufacturing agreements with companies and governments around the world as it gets closer to reporting the first results of the late-stage clinical trial.
It resumed the US trial of the experimental vaccine after approval by US regulators, the company said Friday.
Staff at a London hospital trust have been told to be ready to receive the first batches of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the Sun reported Monday.
