Good news: Late-stage coronavirus vaccine testing is underway

[Chris Smith]

• The first coronavirus vaccine candidate to start Phase 3 trials in the US is Moderna’s mRNA experimental drug that showed promising results in the previous two phases.
• The Phase 3 trial will include 30,000 volunteers at dozens of US locations, including sites where COVID-19 has been surging in recent weeks.
• Should everything go well, the Moderna vaccine could be approved for emergency use this fall. As with other vaccines, there’s no guarantee Phase 3 trials will yield positive results, regardless of what happened in the previous two stages.

Remember back in mid-March how far away coronavirus vaccines seemed to be? Health experts were saying at the time that a vaccine would need anywhere from 12 and 18 months to arrive on a fast-tracked route, and that’s assuming everything went according to plan. Fast-forward to July 27th and the first of several promising COVID-19 vaccines is starting the final clinical testing stage: Moderna’s mRNA vaccine candidate.

Trials have shown that the drug can generate the neutralizing antibodies that block the novel coronavirus from infecting cells, and that it doesn’t have any major side effects. But Phase 3 will determine whether the vaccine actually has a future. There are no guarantees that it will work, and it wouldn’t be the first experimental drug to fail during the final-stage testing period. But if everything goes well, Moderna’s drug could be among the first vaccine candidates to receive approval for emergency use later this year.

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Good news: Late-stage coronavirus vaccine testing is underway originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 27 Jul 2020 at 18:35:32 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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