Fresh hope for vaccine after study’s US success
The firm which won the global race to start injecting volunteers with a coronavirus vaccine has announced positive results in eight people.
Those given two vaccine doses in the Seattle-based trial are reported to have produced higher or similar levels of antibodies compared to people who have recovered from coronavirus.
It is hoped these ‘neutralising’ antibodies will bind to the spiky proteins on Covid-19 so it cannot infect people and get into their cells.
The results suggest the vaccine, produced by the firm Moderna, trains immune systems to recognise and fight off the virus so they are immune to it, although further research is needed.
Moderna also reports that when mice were given the vaccine and then infected with coronavirus, they had ‘full protection’ and the virus was unable to spread through their lungs.
The company’s share price saw a huge leap after the news and helped drive the US stock market higher. Professor Robin Shattock, from Imperial College London, is part of a team also working on a vaccine. he described the results – made public in a press release – as a ‘promising start’.
he added: ‘These are encouraging signs. While it will be important to scrutinise the actual data, the reported findings are in line with expectations that vaccine candidates should provide levels of neutralising antibodies that are at least equivalent to convalescent subjects.’
The Moderna trial used volunteers aged from 18 to 55, and has shown that the injection is generally safe.
It comes as the UK is ramping up efforts to produce its own vaccine.
AstraZeneca has agreed to produce 30 million vaccine doses and initial results from a 510-person trial at Oxford University are hoped to be available next month.
however, a new study may represent a setback for the Oxford trial because it suggests the vaccine may not prevent the virus from spreading. When rhesus macaques were infected with coronavirus vaccine, they were protected from pneumonia, but the virus was shed from the animals’ noses at the same rate.
The study – by a research team involving Oxford University and the Rocky Mountain Veterinary Branch of the National Institutes of health in the US – is a pre-print, meaning it has not been published in a journal or reviewed by other expert scientists.
The authors of the study note that the animals were given a high dose of the virus, which may be higher than the dose for people infected naturally in the community, meaning humans may get better protection.
But Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the University of Nottingham, described the findings as ‘concerning’. he said: ‘If this represents infectious virus and a similar thing occurs in humans, then vaccinated people can still be infected (and) shed large amounts of virus which could potentially spread to others in the community. If the most vulnerable people aren’t protected by the vaccine to the same degree, this will put them at risk.’
Professor Shattock added that he did not think a vaccine would be widely available until next year.
he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘My gut feeling is that we will start to see a number of candidates coming through… but they won’t be readily available for wide-scale use into the beginning of next year as the kind of most optimistic estimation.’
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‘These signs are encouraging’