Novavax started the first phase with 131 volunteers in the cities of Melbourne and Brisbane
A US biotech company today announced the start of human trials in Australia of a coronavirus vaccine in hopes of launching it this year.
Novavax has begun the first phase of the trial in which 131 volunteers in the cities of Melbourne and Brisbane will test the safety of the vaccine and look for early signs of its effectiveness, said the company’s chief research officer, Dr Gregory Glenn.
“We are doing doses in parallel, doing the vaccine in anticipation that we will be able to demonstrate that it is working and be able to start developing it by the end of this year,” Glenn said at a virtual press conference in Melbourne from Novavax headquarters in Maryland.
Animal testing suggested that the vaccine is effective in low doses. Novavax could make at least 100 million doses this year and 1.5 billion in 2021, the doctor said.
US company tests a coronavirus vaccine
Glenn added that the manufacturing of the vaccine, called NVX-CoV2373, was being expanded with a $ 388 million grant from the March, Norwegian-based Coalition for Outbreak Preparedness Innovations.
About a dozen experimental vaccines are in the early stages of testing or ready to go, primarily in China, the United States, and Europe. It is not clear that any of the candidates will ultimately be safe and effective. But many works in different ways and are made with different technologies, increasing the chances that at least one approach will be successful.
The results of the first phase of clinical trials in Australia are expected to be known in July, Novavax specified. Thousands of candidates in various countries would be involved in a second phase.
The trial started with six volunteers who were given the potential vaccine in Melbourne on Tuesday, said Paul Griffin, an infectious disease expert at the Nucleus Network.
Most vaccines aim to train the immune system to recognize the “spike” protein that studs the outer surface of the coronavirus, preparing the body to react if it ever encounters the actual infection. Some vaccines are made using only the genetic code for that protein, and others use a harmless virus to deliver the information the protein produces. There are other vaccines that use more outdated methods, made with the complete dead virus.
Novavax adds another new type to that list, which is called a recombinant vaccine. Novavax used genetic engineering to cultivate harmless copies of the coronavirus spike protein in insect cells in a laboratory. The scientists extracted and purified the protein, and packaged it into virus-sized nanoparticles.
“The way we make a vaccine is that we never touch the virus ,” the company explained to The Associated Press last month. But ultimately, “it looks like a virus to the immune system.” It’s the same process that Novavax used to create a flu nanoparticle vaccine that recently passed late-stage tests.