The Oxford University coronavirus vaccine ‘isn’t too far off’ being approved by regulators and rolled out to Britons, its lead researcher has said.
Professor Sarah Gilbert said although she couldn’t pre-judge the decision of regulators, she ‘really hoped’ Britons would be receiving the jab soon.
The UK has ordered more than 100million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine which, if given the green light by regulators, will significantly expand the country’s arsenal against the virus.
But the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) faces a difficult task deciding whether to approve the vaccine, after volunteers in its clinical trials received different doses.
More than 9,000 received two full doses of the jab – a regimen that was 62 per cent effective against the virus – but a further 3,000 received a half dose and a full dose – which results suggest was 90 per cent effective.
The second group, however, is smaller and included no one who is over 50 and more at risk from the virus – making it hard to determine which dosing regimen is best.
Oxford University insisted this was not a mistake, but said it was an ‘unplanned’ occurrence that happened when the concentration of the vaccine in a batch was ‘over-estimated’, and then toned down to avoid giving people too much.
More than 140,000 Britons have already received the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, after it was approved by the MHRA and the first delivery of 800,000 doses arrived via the Channel Tunnel.
But this supply could be increased by 20 per cent – meaning an extra 130,000 people could be vaccinated – after it emerged there is enough fluid left in the five-dose small glass containers used for transporting it for a sixth dose.
Pfizer said the extra fluid is there to protect against spills and any vaccine fluid that is lost after it becomes stuck to the syringe.
The Oxford Covid-19 jab (pictured) could be approved by regulators very soon, its developer Professor Sarah Gilbert said today
Professor Gilbert, pictured, also said she suffered sleepless nights during its development
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Professor Gilbert said the trial results had pleased but also ‘intrigued’ researchers and ‘immediately led to thoughts of wanting to do more work’.
‘So it wasn’t quite the climax that it might have been,’ she said.
‘But we’re very happy with with the way the vaccine is performing, really looking forward to the point where people can start to be vaccinated outside of clinical trials.
‘Obviously I can’t prejudge that moment, the regulator’s have to be given their time to make their decisions but I really hope that that moment isn’t too far off.’
She also told the programme how she endured sleepless nights while developing the vaccine.
‘Running a research group is a bit like running a small business,’ she said.
‘I have to think about where the money’s going to come from, what staff I’ve got, how long their contracts are. Because they’re only funded for the contracts that I have funding to pay them for.
‘So it is like running a business and I unfortunately don’t spend as much of my time working on the science as I would like to but it’s necessary to keep all the other things going in order to be able to do science that really has impact.’
The mother of grown-up triplets added that she was sometimes known to send emails at 4am during its development, when she woke up late at night and thought through all the possible obstacles to getting the vaccine trials completed.
Describing the team’s work on creating a vaccine, she said the final parts of the jab were designed in a weekend.
She said: ‘We’d already made a lot of decisions about how we were going to design the vaccine but it was just the parts that we had to wait for the actual sequence to get, and then that was put together.
‘But a lot of it is using methods we’d used previously – there’s only small parts of it that are unique to this vaccine.’
It comes after an AstraZeneca boss said it would have run the trials differently had it been in charge.
AstraZeneca’s Dr Mene Pangalos told BBC Panorama, in an episode that will air tonight: ‘There is no doubt I think that we would have run the study a little bit differently if we had been doing it from scratch.
‘But ultimately it is what it is and I think the Oxford group have done a fantastic job and then we’ve done as good a job as we possibly can to translate that into the data-set that we can provide to the regulators and to regions around the world for the approval.’
Dr Pangalos has previously said the different dosing regimes given in the trials were due to ‘serendipity’ – meaning the occurrence of events by chance in a happy and beneficial way.
As many as 200 centres in the UK are ready to start administering vaccines, the health secretary said. Pictured is a man getting the jab yesterday in Manchester
AstraZeneca was not part of the team that invented the vaccine but later joined the project as a manufacturer, meaning it did not help design the first trials.
Professor Gilbert has previously said the chances of their vaccine being approved by the end of 2020 were ‘pretty high’.
But regulators are still yet to give the green light, or say which dosing regimen to use.
The professor has previously suggested the second dosing method may be more effective because the first shot ‘primes the immune system’ before the second improves the response.
It has been suggested this could also better reflect a natural infection, when a small dose of the virus is battled off by the immune system, before a larger dose.
On concerns over the efficacy of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, Professor Gilbert previously said: ‘What’s important is vaccinating population, not vaccinating people and thinking about efficacy on an individual level.
‘And if we don’t have enough doses of the Pfizer vaccine to vaccinate everybody, then we’ll be much worse off than being able to vaccinate large numbers of people with other vaccines.’