Getty Medical personnel move a deceased patient to a refrigerated truck serving as make shift morgues at Brooklyn Hospital Center on April 09, 2020 in New York City.
Big pharma company Pfizer says it’s “currently on track” to releasing 100 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, according to ABC.
The manufacturer, which is working with BioNTech, announced positive data results Wednesday from its early stages of drug trials, the station continued.
ABC reported that the experimental vaccine “spurred immune responses in healthy patients,” but also sparked fevers as well as other symptoms.
“It’s been a tremendous amount of work and there’s now a lot of pride to see the results start to come forward,” Phil Dormitzer, a vaccine developer at Pfizer, told ABC. “The potential is there to actually change a lot of people’s lives.”
Adding, “In this program, we’re going fast. But that does not mean that we’re cutting corners or having any lowering of the safety standards.”
The Recent Study Focused on a Group of 45
GettyA model of COVID-19, known as coronavirus, is seen ahead of testimony from Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), during a US Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the plan to research, manufacture and distribute a coronavirus vaccine, known as Operation Warp Speed, July 2, 2020.
The vaccine established antibodies against the virus that causes Covid-19, called SARS-CoV-2, according to Stat News. Patients who received the trial drug at lower levels saw neutralizing antibodies, which prevent the virus from functioning, roughly two times higher than the levels of those in people who beat the virus, the outlet continued.
Stat reported that 45 patients were randomly assigned to get one of the three doses of vaccine or a placebo. One batch of 12 received a 10-microgram dose, another 12 got a 30-microgram dose and a third group of 12 received a 100-microgram dose, while nine were given a placebo.
The highest dose caused “fevers in half of patients,” Stat said.
Pregnant women were not included in the study, the website confirmed. Diversity information was also not made available, Stat continued, but the companies assured that their future studies will feature more diverse groups.
The recent study stemmed from one of the four vaccine candidates being tested by the two companies, according to the Washington Post. Pfizer and its partner plan to use the data to shape the design for an upcoming 30,000-person trial slated to begin at the end of the month, the Post said.
Dormitzer told ABC that they are “tracking the evolution of the virus closely” to to eliminate the potential for mutations that could deter the vaccine.
“You do see some mutation in the virus, but fortunately we’ve not seen any indication of mutations that would decrease the efficacy of the vaccine,” he said.
Pfizer Stocks are Up Since the Release of its Vaccine Trials
GettyA man is reflected in a bus stop window as he walks past Pfizer world headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.
Pfizer stock shares have skyrocketed following the company’s announcement of its vaccine timeline, Barron’s reported.
Shares of Pfizer were up nearly 2.5 percent as of Thursday morning, the organization continued. The shares had already climbed by 3.2% the day before.
Barron’s said BioNTech shares, on the other hand, were up by more than 7% as of Thursday morning.
Earlier this week, the FDA released guidance for “vaccine developers that some analysts had taken to indicate that the agency would be unwilling to even give emergency-use authorization to a vaccine before next year,” Barron’s said.
Pfizer’s timeline indicates that the manufacturer might not agree though, the website added.
“Given Pfizer’s experience with running large vaccine trials, the companies believe they can enroll the pivotal trial in four weeks and have data in the late August/early September ahead of a potential regulatory filing in October,” Mizuho analyst Vamil Divan said in a Wednesday statement obtained by Barron’s.
Adding, “While achieving those timelines would be unprecedented in vaccine development, the companies believe they may be able to accomplish this and still meet the requirements of the recently-released FDA guidance on COVID-19 vaccine development.”
Pfizer plans to release another 1.2 billion doses in 2021, ABC reported.
“The goal that we’ve set is to distribute millions of vaccine doses in 2020 and executing on that, of course, means everything has to go well,” Dormitzer told the station. “We need the regulatory approval to do so. But that is our plan.”
ABC also disclosed that the World Health Organization recently announced that 17 candidate vaccines are currently in the human trials of testing.
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