Moderna Ships Updated Covid-19 Vaccine to NIH for Testing (South African variant)

[Celerity]

https://www.barrons.com/articles/moderna-ships-updated-covid-19-vaccine-to-nih-for-testing-51614201130?mod=article_inline

Only 6% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated against Covid-19, but on Wednesday evening, the era of the second generation of vaccines arrived. Moderna announced Wednesday that it had shipped to the National Institutes of Health doses of a new version of its vaccine, this one designed to protect against the South African variant of the virus that causes Covid-19. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases will run an early-stage clinical trial of the new vaccine once it receives approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Moderna also plans to run its own clinical trials in parallel with the NIAID trial. Moderna (ticker: MRNA) says that, while initial data shows that its Covid-19 original vaccine will be effective in protecting against the South African variant, it is developing alternatives “out of an abundance of caution.”

“I think of this as an insurance policy,” Moderna’s chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, told Barron’s on Wednesday. “We’re prepared, should we need it. But let’s remember, there is a very high efficacy for the [messenger RNA-based] vaccines, certainly against the ancestral strains, and we believe that the vaccines should also have efficacy against these variants.” Still, Zaks said that the company was not simply thinking of the new version of the vaccine simply as a proof of concept. “There is a possibility we will need it,” he said, particularly as immunity provided by the original vaccine wanes over time.

“One of the concerns we and public health officials have is whether, in older or otherwise vulnerable people, as immunity wanes, you may become preferentially susceptible to these variants of concern,” Zaks said. “If that’s the case… you want to be ready to boost people before you realize there’s a huge unmet need there because people are getting infected.” The company said it planned to test the new vaccine, which it is calling mRNA-1273.351, as a booster for people who have already received the original vaccine, and as part of a series with the original vaccine as a primary vaccination. It will also test a multivalent booster shot made up of both the original vaccine and mRNA-1273.351, and a third dose of its original vaccine as a booster.

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Pfizer (PFE), which with BioNTech (BNTX) has developed the other Covid-19 vaccine authorized by the FDA, has yet to announce an updated version of its vaccine that targets an emerging strain. Novavax (NVAX), which is running a Phase 3 trial in the U.S. of its Covid-19 vaccine, says it is working on its own update.

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