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Oxford University and AstraZeneca announced on Thursday that their vaccine candidate produces a strong immune response in elderly patients and is safe, according to preliminary results published in a leading medical journal.
In an article published in The Lancet, researchers from the university and the pharmaceutical company said their vaccine had been tested on 560 participants; 240 of them were over 70 years old. The vaccine is in phase II / III production, that is, the phase into which a candidate vaccine enters after being found to be safe and potentially effective among a smaller group of participants and can be expanded to a comparatively larger group. tall. Labeled as “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19”, the vaccine candidate is an “adenovirus vector vaccine”, which means that it consists of modified viruses that carry the gene for a virus (in this case SARS-Cov-2 , the virus that causes COVID-19 Disease) in our body. The purpose of adenovirus vector vaccines is to convince the body that it has been infected so that it can successfully fight off the real viruses if they enter the body. In the case of this potential vaccine, that would prompt the body to make advanced coronavirus proteins that would help it fight the virus.
Adenovirus vector vaccines are not without controversy. In fact, the only adenovirus vector vaccine that is used commercially today is an anti-rabies vaccine for wild animals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also authorizes adenovirus vaccines for some military personnel, but no version has been approved for the general public. The human body can become immune to the adenoviral vectors used in the vaccine, making boosters more difficult. Additionally, vaccines may not work for people who have previously been naturally exposed to the viruses in question.
As Axios reported, the next step for the vaccine candidate is to enter Phase III trials, where the initial clinical group is further expanded to a larger and more diverse group of participants. If the vaccine is determined to be both safe and effective in controlling the virus at this point, then it may be considered for mass production and distribution.
“The robust antibody and T cell responses seen in the elderly in our study are encouraging,” Dr Maheshi Ramasamy of the University of Oxford, co-author of The Lancet study, told CBS News. “We hope this means our vaccine will help protect some of society’s most vulnerable people, but more research is needed before we can be sure.”
News from the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine trials was not always promising. During Phase III trials of a different vaccine in September, a patient in the UK experienced a suspected side effect serious enough to prompt the company to suspend its study. As Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told CBS News at the time, “This particular candidate from the AstraZeneca company had a serious adverse event, this which means you put the rest of the individual volunteer registration on hold until you can determine precisely what happened. “
He added, “It’s really one of the safety valves that you have on clinical trials like this, so it’s unfortunate that this has happened. I do not know. They need to investigate further. “
This isn’t the first encouraging news on the vaccine front to come this week. Pfizer and Moderna announced this week that they have made progress in the development of their vaccine candidates, with Moderna claiming there has been “94.5% vaccine effectiveness” with its drug and Pfizer (which works with the company German BioNTech SE) reporting similar results. Unlike the Oxford / AstraZeneca candidate, the Pfizer and Moderna candidates are in phase III of their trials. In addition, rather than being adenovirus vector vaccines, they are both mRNA (synthetic messenger RNA) vaccines. MRNA vaccines are a new biotechnology that uses a synthetic version of mRNA, or the part of the DNA of a living creature that tells cells which proteins to make so they can stay healthy, to make the proteins already present in a virus so that the body can fight it more effectively.
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