What happened
Shares of COVID-19 vaccine players Heat Biologics (NASDAQ: HTBX), Inovio Pharma (NASDAQ: INO), en Novavax (NASDAQ: NVAX) start all week off on a sour note. Heat Biologics’ share is down 13%, Inovio’s shares are down by 10.6%, and Novavax’s share is in the red by 11.1% from 10:09 am EDT Monday morning.
What haunts investors? Reports surfaced over the weekend that President Donald Trump may have the green light AstraZeneca‘s (NYSE: AZN) experimental COVID-19 vaccine through October. The approval, if it happens, would probably happen through a mechanism known as Authorization for Emergency Use (EUA).
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So what
On Sunday, the Food and Drug Administration announced the EUA’s recovery from plasma therapy, a move that seems to be attracting fears among investors in vaccine companies that are not quite ahead of AstraZeneca in terms of clinical development. Simply put, AstraZeneca can jump these second tier players through an EUA.
Heat Biologics has so far released promising pre-clinical data for its heat shock protein based COVID-19 vaccine. But an early-stage trial is unlikely to begin until the first quarter of 2021. Inovio, on the other hand, plans to launch a phase 2/3 trial for its COVID later this year. 19 vaccine candidate, known as INO-4800. Finally, Novavax’s COVID-19 candidate, NVX-CoV2373, has only conducted a phase 1 trial up to this point.
That AstraZeneca actually has a good chance of hitting all three of these companies to the punch – that is, if these rumors of an EUA come true.
Well what
Should bargain hunters hit one of these deleted coronavirus files today? It’s bad to say. There are many moving parts on the fax development front. Researchers do not even understand the respective roles of internal versus adaptive immunity when it comes to this particular virus. That leaves a lot of room for late comers like Heat Biologics, Inovio, and Novavax.
Bottom line: AstraZeneca vaccine – if approved under EUA – is unlikely to be a showstopper for these other companies. So, if you are risk tolerant, it may be worthwhile to pick up a few shares of one or more of these coronavirus vaccines today.
