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The situation triggered by the second wave of coronavirus in the country does not give a truce, and while waiting for the importation of new vaccines in Argentina, the government is considering other possibilities, such as local manufacture of the Russian vaccine Sputnik-V.
Now all eyes are on another type of vaccine, which is in development at the Canadian lab Medicago and British society GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). It’s a herbal vaccine that, thanks to the approval of National Administration of Drugs, Foods and Medical Technologies (ANMAT), is in phase III trial.
Last Tuesday, the two firms reported that the interim results obtained for the new COVID-19 vaccine had been positive. We are happy to see that the results suggest a very strong immune response. said GSK Vaccines Chief Medical Officer, Thomas breuer. “We look forward to the results of the Phase III trial of this candidate vaccine as the next step in our contribution to the global response to the pandemic,” he added.
The new vaccine, which is still in development and requires two doses to complete immunization, “induced strong cellular immune responses and neutralizing antibodies in all subjects, regardless of age.” sumo Nathalie Landry, executive vice president of medical and scientific affairs at Medicago.
Last Sunday, March 16, Phase III of the product trial began to be implemented with volunteers from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Brazil, and soon Argentina will collaborate with approximately five thousand men and women with the aim of continuing to test the efficacy of the vaccine.
Volunteers must be between the ages of 18 and 59, not have had COVID-19 and not have been vaccinated. Half of them will be vaccinated with the test dose and the other half will receive a placebo – and, if the vaccine is approved, those who received the placebo will then be vaccinated with the active drug. The vaccine will have two application times, like most of those already known, and the two doses should be three weeks apart.
The vaccine under development has a vegetable base combined with the pandemic adjuvant from GSK. The use of living plants as bioreactors manages to reproduce “virus-like particles” – in English “virus like particle” – that is to say, non-infectious particles which mimic the virus. Being a plant product, they do not need to be stored at extremely cold temperatures, but refrigerators can be used, which makes it easier to store them.
“Benthamian nicotine plants are used, which is the most widely used experimental host in plant virology, due to the large number of viruses that can successfully infect it,” they report from Medicago. “Their weakened immune system, the result of natural genetic changes over millennia, means that the genetic material can be successfully harbored by the plant and not rejected.”
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