Another step in the long race for the coronavirus vaccine. The US company Moderna, co-funded by the US government, announced that it will enter the third and final phase of clinical trials in July. It involves 30,000 volunteers.
This is the decisive phase of the trials, which will make it possible to see, on a very large sample of healthy people, whether the vaccine is more effective than a placebo in preventing contamination by the new coronavirus. The protocol has been finalized with the United States Medicines Agency (FDA), and the trial will be conducted in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
One billion doses if successful
Moderna is, along with the University of Oxford, which has also launched a large-scale trial on 10,000 volunteers and expects first results in September, to be among the very first in the global vaccine race. Biotech received $ 483 million from the United States government. On May 18, it announced encouraging initial results on a small number of volunteers (eight), as part of the first phase of clinical trials.
Phase 2, which will include 600 volunteers, started in late May. Vaccination is done in two separate doses of 28 days. Half of the participants receive a placebo, randomly. If the dose chosen for the tests (100 micrograms) proved to be effective, Moderna planned to be able to produce 500 million doses per year, and "possibly up to 1 billion".
The company is one of the five companies on which the administration of President Donald Trump would have bet in the context of its operation "Warp Speed" (according to the speed of light), according to the New York Times , with AstraZeneca (industrial partner Oxford vaccine), Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer. The goal is to make 300 million doses of vaccine by January 2021.
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