We are months into the global war on Coronavirus with no end in sight and no viable Vaccine in the market. However, there is tremendous amount of hope on getting a vaccine to the masses around the world.
Almost every day we continue to read about a company or the other claiming a move towards the next stage of clinical trails, effectively moving us towards a vaccine. Back in March-2020, we featured an article Companies that are working on coronavirus (COVID-19) treatments or vaccines
This weekend, an article in the New York Times describes Indian Billionaires Bet Big on Head Start in Coronavirus Vaccine Race, A few key highlights from the article:
- The Serum Institute, which is exclusively controlled by a small and fabulously rich Indian family and started out years ago as a horse farm, is doing what a few other companies in the race for a vaccine are doing: mass-producing hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine candidate that is still in trials and might not even work.
- The world’s largest vaccine producer, the Serum Institute, announced a plan to make hundreds of millions of doses of an unproven inoculation. The company has teamed up with the Oxford scientists to produce the vaccine. But even if this vaccine fails to win the race, the Serum Institute will still be instrumental. It has teamed up with other vaccine designers, at earlier stages of development, to manufacture four other vaccines, though those are not being mass produced yet.
- National health ministers, prime ministers and other heads of state (he wouldn’t say who) and friends he hasn’t heard from in years have been calling him (Adar Poonawalla, Serum’s chief executive), begging for the first batches.
Atul Loke for The New York Times
India’s Serum Institute is not alone in the quest for a COVID-19 vaccine. American and European governments have committed billions of dollars to this effort, cutting deals with pharmaceutical giants such as Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Sanofi and AstraZeneca to speed up the development and production of select vaccine candidates in exchange for hundreds of millions of doses.
- Phase 3 clinical trial of investigational vaccine for COVID-19 begins (NIH.gov) – The vaccine, known as mRNA-1273, was co-developed by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna, Inc., and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The trial, which will be conducted at U.S. clinical research sites, is expected to enroll approximately 30,000 adult volunteers who do not have COVID-19.
- AstraZeneca reports good progress of Covid-19 vaccine in trials – AstraZeneca has reported that it has obtained ‘good data so far’ on its Covid-19 vaccine candidate, which was licensed from the University of Oxford and is currently in large-scale clinical studies.
- Dozens of COVID-19 vaccines are in development (National Geographic) – Here are the COVID-19 vaccine prospects that have made it to phase three trials and beyond.
- Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker – The New York Times
- Safety and Immunogenicity Study of 2019-nCoV Vaccine (mRNA-1273) for Prophylaxis of SARS-CoV-2 Infection (COVID-19) – clinicaltrials.gov