Concern about the South African strain worsened last week.
Ronny Hartmann / AFP via Getty ImagesModerna is developing an experimental booster dose of its Covid-19 vaccine to help protect against the new strain of coronavirus identified in South Africa, the company said Monday.
The company is the first developer of a vaccine to announce a program to update its vaccine to protect against one of the newly-identified strains of Covid-19 now spreading around the world.
“Out of an abundance of caution and leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform, we are advancing an emerging variant booster candidate against the variant first identified in the Republic of South Africa into the clinic to determine if it will be more effective to boost titers against this and potentially future variants,” said Moderna’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel, in a statement Monday.
As recently as two weeks ago, experts, including Pfizer’s (ticker: PFE) chief scientific officer, speculated that the current Covid-19 vaccines would remain effective for a year or longer. But concern seemed to grow late last week, particularly around the South African strain, which has yet to be detected in the U.S.
In a White House press conference on Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that current vaccines would likely be less effective against the South African strain.
Moderna (MRNA) said Monday that laboratory tests of blood from people who had received its original vaccine suggest that the vaccine should be just as effective against the strain that first emerged in the U.K. as it was against earlier versions of the virus. That echoes similar findings from Pfizer about its vaccine.
But Moderna also said that tests of its vaccine were less reassuring against the South African strain. While the lab tests did suggest that the vaccine would offer some protection against the strain, it doesn’t appear to work as well as it did against other versions of the virus.
“Pseudovirus neutralizing antibody titers were approximately 6-fold lower relative to prior variants,” the company wrote in a press release. “These lower titers may suggest a potential risk of earlier waning of immunity” to the South African strain.
A paper reporting the results of the study was posted to the website biorxiv.org, which hosts scientific papers published before they are peer reviewed. Moderna said it would hold an investor call after the paper had been posted.
The company said it would run a Phase 1 study of the new booster shot in the U.S. It said it expected the booster to work not only in patients who had been initially inoculated with its vaccine, but also “in combination with all of the leading vaccine candidates.”
In addition to testing a booster designed to protect against the new South African variant, Moderna also said it would investigate whether giving patients a third dose of its original vaccine could offer additional protection against new strains of the virus.
Shares of Moderna were up 10.3% on Monday morning, while shares of Pfizer were up 0.7% and shares of BioNTech (BNTX), which co-developed Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, were up 0.3%.
The news came hours after Merck (MRK) announced it was scrapping its Covid-19 vaccine programs after they turned up disappointing results in Phase 1 trials.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com
January 25, 2021 at 10:31PM
https://ift.tt/3cbkN08
Moderna Making Vaccine Booster Shot to Protect Against South African Covid-19 Strain - Barron's
https://ift.tt/2DVP6sH
No comments:
Post a Comment