Browsing: Vaccines

The Washington Post has produced an exceptional work on vaccines and their progress.  It does a wonderful job describing the complexity of vaccine development using infographics. Some of the key points. Researchers in the United States set an audacious goal in January to develop a coronavirus vaccine within 12 to 18 months. This would be a world record. The mumps vaccine is considered to be the fastest to move, in four years, from scientific concept to approval in 1967. The quest for an HIV vaccine continues, 36 years and counting. Coronavirus vaccines are moving much faster, partly because governments are taking on the…

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FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute, is currently tracking the development of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19 (coronavirus). This tracker contains an aggregation of publicly-available information from validated sources. According to Milken there are:  316 Treatments in 7 categories are being developed now.  212 Vaccines in development in 9 categories.  34 of which are now in testing.  The leading vaccine candidates as of mid September 2020 are listed here. 

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SUMMARY: The first injection for Moderna’s vaccine trail in partnership with the National Institutes of Health aims to enroll about 30,000 people from 89 widely dispersed sites across the U.S. It is the first possible coronavirus vaccine to enter a phase three trial in the U.S.  If the vaccine remains on track, Moderna previously said it will be able to deliver “approximately 500 million doses per year, and possibly up to 1 billion doses per year” starting in 2021.The company announced earlier this month that healthy adults whowere given the vaccine in the phase one trial tolerated it generally well and all…

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A COVID-19 vaccine called AZD1222  being developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford showed “robust immune responses” in early-stage clinical trials neutralizing antibody responses  in 91 percent of the participants who received a single dose of AZD1222 and 100 percent of the participants who received the booster dose.  The United States announced it secured 300 million doses of the experimental vaccine—nearly one-third of the first one billion doses the drug maker plans to produce.  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services pledged up to $1.2 billion to accelerate the program. Though these early trial results show that the vaccine induced a…

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The U.S. has agreed to pay Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE nearly $2 billion to secure 100 million doses of their experimental Covid-19 vaccine to provide to all Americans free of charge. Under the $1.95 billion agreement, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department will receive 100 million doses of the vaccine should it be cleared by regulators, and can also acquire an additional 500 million doses. The U.S. has already made other agreements including a $1.2 billion deal with AstraZeneca PLC for at least 300 million doses of a vaccine developed by University of Oxford.…

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SUMMARY: BioNTech expects to begin phase three trials, at the end of July. Gilead Sciences also announced that test results on remdesivir, the only approved treatment for COVID-19, shows a reduction in mortality in 62 percent of extremely sick patients. Optimism from a potential vaccine and the success of remdesivir also resulted in spike in the US stock market.   Abridged. The CEO of the German company BioNTech told The Hill that he expects the coronavirus vaccine the company is developing in partnership with Pfizer to be ready for approval by December. BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said several hundred million doses could be produced even before approval and up to 1.2…

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