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Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel announced new data on Monday showing his company’s vaccine remains effective in tackling new coronavirus variants, even as he painted a long way to go in the war against the pandemic.
The biotech company’s study showed what it called “protective” immune responses to both the variant first documented in the UK (B.1.1.7) and the variant seen in South Africa (B.1.351).
Still, Bancel gave a stern assessment of the pandemic, saying there was good reason to expect a need for continuous booster vaccines to protect against mutations that could spread other variants of SARS-Cov. -2, the virus causing the global COVID-19 epidemic.
“I believe SARS-Cov-2 will stay with humans forever,” Bancel said in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live. “We’re going to have to have boosts adapted to a virus, like we did for the flu. It’s the same, they’re both mRNA viruses, and we’re going to have to live with that forever.
The company announced Monday that it is also starting a test of an additional booster dose of its vaccine, out of caution to potentially boost the immune response against emerging strains.
Bancel noted that while the original two-dose vaccine did, in fact, preserve a protective response against the South African strain, with neutralizing antibodies declining six-fold compared to earlier variants.
Nonetheless, Bancel said the vaccine still provided a stronger immune response than one would expect in patients contracting COVID-19, and the company downplayed fears that its vaccine would become ineffective against the new strains.
Looking ahead, Bancel emphasized the importance of the booster dose, given production capacity constraints already stretched amid shipments of its two-dose vaccine.
“The big question with the boost is going to be the dose,” he said. “Do you need 25, 50 or 100 micrograms? The current FDA cleared product is 100 micrograms, twice: a bounty and a boost. “
He reaffirmed Moderna’s original goal of delivering 100 million doses of vaccine to the United States by March as planned. However, what the studies just showed about booster dosing could play an important role when it comes to staying one step ahead of future variants.
“If a dose was 50 or 25 micrograms, which is possible because your immune system is already prepared, you might not need a big boost in capacity,” he said.
Setting the “ bar for success ”
Of course, the future of the pandemic depends on a number of factors. Among the most pressing issues are the slow rollout of vaccines to the public and the timing of other vaccine approvals – including Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) vaccine candidate, which could come in the next two weeks.
Bancel said another vaccine candidate, joining the effort led by Moderna and Pfizer (PFE), could help reorient his company’s capabilities towards boosters for problematic variants in the fall.
“I hope the Johnson & Johnson vaccine [comes] soon, ”he said, noting that Moderna’s mRNA vaccine technology has led to a faster approval process than others.
“Some technologies will not be able to go fast enough. Think about it, some of the older technologies they cite, they said they won’t have a vaccine until the end of the year, ”he speculated.
As Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, recently observed, the virus is expected to continue to spread and mutate for some time while the vaccine doses are being given. This makes controlling the virus a first step, but far enough from its complete elimination.
“I don’t think we should start defining the elimination or eradication of this virus as the bar for success,” Bancel told Yahoo Finance. “The bar for success is to reduce the ability of this virus to kill, to hospitalize people, to destroy our economic (and) social lives.”
Zack Guzman is an anchor for Yahoo Finance Live as well as a senior writer covering entrepreneurship, cannabis, startups, and breaking news at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on twitter @zGuz.
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