Hopes of getting a Covid-19 vaccine were raised today after Moderna’s experimental jab was proven to trigger an immune response in all 45 injected volunteers.
Researchers also found the jab — one of the front-runners in the global coronavirus vaccine race — was safe and no participants suffered any serious side effects.
But more than half reported mild or moderate reactions such as fatigue, headache, chills, muscle aches or pain at the injection site. These were more likely to occur after the second dose and in people who got the highest dose.
Massachusetts-based Moderna was the first US company to start human testing of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus on March 16, 66 days after the genetic sequence of the pathogen was released.
Scientists around the world are still desperately rushing to find a vaccine, which is seen as key to unlocking the economy and ending the pandemic, which has killed almost 600,000 people worldwide since January.
It comes after a leading British scientist behind another experimental jab developed at Imperial College London claimed that a Covid-19 vaccine could be ready within a year if trials go well.
Moderna’s experimental coronavirus vaccine triggered an immune response and only resulted in mild side effects in a trial of 45 healthy volunteers, according to results published Tuesday
‘The world urgently needs vaccines to protect against Covid-19,’ said Dr Lisa Jackson of Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle and lead author of the study.
The US federal government is supporting Moderna’s vaccine with nearly half a billion dollars and has chosen it as one of the first to enter large-scale human trials.
A successful Covid-19 jab could be a turning point for Moderna, which has never had a licensed product.
Moderna’s shot, mRNA-1273, uses ribonucleic acid (RNA) – a chemical messenger that contains instructions for making proteins. When injected into people, the vaccine instructs cells to make proteins that mimic the outer surface of the coronavirus, which the body recognizes as a foreign invader, and mounts an immune response against.
The results released on Tuesday involved three doses of the vaccine, tested in groups of 15 volunteers aged 18-55 who got two shots, 28 days apart. The groups tested 25, 100 or 250 micrograms of the vaccine.
The team reported that individuals who got two doses of the vaccine had high levels of virus-killing neutralizing antibodies that exceeded the average levels seen in people who had recovered from COVID-19.
Adverse events after the second dose occurred in seven of the 13 volunteers who got the 25-microgram dose, all 15 participants who received the 100 microgram dose and all 14 who got the 250 microgram dose.
In the highest-dose group, three patients had severe reactions such as fever, chills, headache or nausea. One of these had a fever of 103.28 Fahrenheit (39.6 C).
‘We didn’t see any events that are characterized as serious adverse events,’ Jackson said, referring to reactions that require hospitalization or result in death.
In June, Moderna said it selected the 100-microgram dose for its late-stage study to minimize adverse reactions.
At that dose, Moderna said the company is on track to deliver about 500 million doses per year, and possibly up to 1 billion doses per year, starting in 2021, from the company’s internal U.S. manufacturing site and strategic collaboration with Swiss drugmaker Lonza.
‘It’s a good first step,’ said Dr William Schaffner, a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who was not involved in the study.
‘There’s nothing here that would inhibit one from going ahead to the Phase 2/Phase 3 trials,’ he said.
‘A little fatigue and headache and myalgia (muscle pain) and pain at the injection site is a small price to pay for protection against COVID-19.’
In April, Moderna expanded the Phase 1 trial to include adults over 55, who are more at risk of serious disease, with the aim of enrolling 120 volunteers.
Moderna said it will follow study volunteers for a year after the second shot, to look for side effects and check how long immunity lasts. (Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago Editing by Matthew Lewis)