“Positive news is coming” on the Covid-19 vaccine that the University of Oxford is developing with AstraZeneca Plc, ITV’s Robert Peston has said in a tweet, without specifying how he obtained the information.
Shares in AstraZeneca rose as much as 4% in London.
“The vaccine is generating the kind of antibody and T-cell (killer cell) response that the researchers would hope to see,” Peston wrote, adding that details will be released soon in medical journal The Lancet.
Oxford’s vaccine trial — led by Sarah Gilbert, who is profiled this week in Bloomberg Businessweek — is already undergoing phase III testing in Brazil. The trial shot is seen as being months ahead of other key candidates.
The news came a day after the Covid-19 vaccine being developed by the biotechnology company Moderna in partnership with the National Institutes of Health hwas reported to have found to induce immune responses in all of the volunteers who received it in a Phase 1 study.
These early results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday, showed that the vaccine worked to trigger an immune response with mild side effects — fatigue, chills, headache, muscle pain, pain at the injection site — becoming the first US vaccine candidate to publish results in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
The vaccine is expected to begin later this month a large Phase 3 trial — the final trial stage before regulators consider whether to make the vaccine available.
Moderna noted in a statement Tuesday that, if all goes well in future studies, “the Company remains on track to be able to deliver approximately 500 million doses per year, and possibly up to 1 billion doses per year, beginning in 2021.”
