ANOTHER COVID VACCINE SHOWS PROMISE IN EARLY TRIALS

FRANKFURT: A Covid-19 vaccine developed by German biotech firm BioNTech and US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has shown potential and was found to be well tolerated in early-stage human trials, the companies said on Wednesday.

The drug is one of 17 being tested on humans in a frantic global race to find a vaccine.

The potential treatment is the fourth early-stage Covid-19 drug to show promise in human testing, along with projects involving Moderna, CanSino Biologics and Inovio Pharmaceuticals.

BioNTech said testing of two dosages of its BNT162b1 drug on 24 healthy volunteers showed that after 28 days they had developed higher levels of Covid-19 antibodies than typically seen in infected people.

It said the higher of the two doses - both administered via two injections within three weeks of one another - was followed by a short fever in three out of four participants after the second shot. A third dosage, tested at a higher concentration in a separate group, was not repeated after the first shot because of injection pain.

“These first trial results show that the vaccine yields immune activity and causes a strong immune response,” said BioNTech’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ugur Sahin.

He said larger trials were being prepared to show whether this translates into protection against a real infection.

“While more work needs to be done, we believe the benefits appear to outweigh the risks so far, especially when considering the disease the vaccine is trying to prevent,” Mizuho Securities analyst Divan Vamil said in a note.

BioNTech and Pfizer will now pick the most promising of four experimental vaccines for a trial involving up to 30,000 healthy participants, which is likely to begin in the US and Europe in late July, if it gets the regulatory green light.