A COVID-19 vaccine has passed its first human trial. But is it the frontrunner?
A PROMISING CORONAVIRUS vaccine candidate cleared a key hurdle this week, when Moderna Therapeutics entered phase two of clinical trials. The move signals that the company’s mRNA vaccine has passed its initial safety checks and has met an important milestone in bringing this drug closer to the public and commercial markets.
After almost five months of global deaths and economic shutdowns wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, people are anxiously awaiting a glimmer of hope for a return to normal routines. This partly explains the recent frenzy over results from Moderna and its frontrunner candidate, which moved from the company’s lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to human trials in a record-setting 63 days.
On May 18, the biotech company had announced preliminary findings that healthy subjects had responded to its mRNA vaccine by producing “neutralizing antibodies.” Antibodies are the key sentinels made by the immune system to prevent infection by the coronavirus. Experts were quick to point out that the results applied to only eight people out of 45 in the trial, which is being conducted by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The company has not released sufficient information to gauge whether the phase one subjects had protective immune responses, which is widely considered by immunologists to involve more than simply producing antibodies.
But the details that Moderna did present, paired with the latest announcement, suggest that the company may be on its way to achieving something unprecedented: licensing the first mRNA vaccine for human use.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/coronavirus-vaccine-passes-first-human-trial-but-is-it-frontrunner-cvd/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=SpecialEdition_20200529&rid=FB26C926963C5C9490D08EC70E179424
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