There’s big hope for a COVID-19 vaccine.
A report from STAT News reported that a Chicago hospital saw patients “experienced rapid recovery from fevers and respiratory symptoms” thanks to Gilead’s Remdesivir. Should it continue to show positive results, U.S. FDA approval may not be far behind.
“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the Remdesivir studies for University of Chicago Medicine, as quoted by STAT News.
At the moment, there are no approved drugs on market for COVID-10. However, with several ongoing trials – including the one from Gilead – we may be one step closer.
Moderna Inc. (MRNA) is Also Seeing Progress
Moderna is pushing higher after winning an $843 million U.S. award to develop a vaccine. “By investing now in our manufacturing process scale-up to enable large scale production for pandemic response, we believe that we would be able to supply millions of doses per month in 2020 and with further investments, tens of millions per month in 2021, if the vaccine candidate is successful in the clinic,” said CEO Stéphane Bancel, as quoted by Fierce Biotech.
Moderna hopes to have safety data from Phase 1 trials shortly, which could allow it to advance to the next phase in the second quarter.
Development also requires a large effectiveness study, says CNBC, involving thousands of people. “If all those things go well we are hoping to be able to be ready commercially to make the vaccine widely available in the U.S. in 2021, says CEO Bancel.
Other Top Companies are Racing to Help
Takeda Pharmaceuticals (TAK) is looking into “whether blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients, which can contain infection-fighting antibodies, can be used against the illness. Similar treatments have shown promise in treating other serious infections,” says Bloomberg.
Inovio Pharmaceuticals (INO) is experimenting with a vaccine that uses DNA to activate immune systems. It kicked off a study in early April, with results pending.
BioNTech (BNTX) just received a $185 million upfront payment from Pfizer for a COVID-19 vaccine development collaboration, says MarketWatch. BNTX could also receive milestone payments of up to $563 million from this, as well.
