Novavax, an American vaccine development company headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, has started conducting trials on an experimental coronavirus vaccine in Australia.
The company began injecting the vaccine into people with hopes of releasing it by the end of this year.
Novavax will inject the experimental vaccine in more than 130 volunteers in the first phase of the clinical trial testing the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, according to the company’s chief scientist Dr. Gregory Glenn.
Currently, at least 12 experimental vaccines have been undergoing trials in early stages, mostly in the United States, China, and Europe.
It is unclear whether they will be proven safe and effective. However, researchers hope that at least one might succeed.
Dr. Glenn said, “We are in parallel making doses, making vaccine in anticipation that we’ll be able to show it’s working and be able to start deploying it by the end of this year.”
Pre-clinical studies suggested the vaccine is effective in lower doses. Dr. Glenn said Novavax could manufacture at least 100 million doses of the vaccine this year and 1.5 billion in 2021.
Manufacture of the vaccine, named NVX-CoV2373, was being scaled up with $388 million invested by Norway-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations since March, Dr. Glenn said.
Novavax said the results of the first phase of the clinical trials in Australia are expected by July. The vaccine will then be tested on thousands of candidates in several nations, which would be the second phase of the trials.
Australian infectious disease expert Dr. Paul Griffin said, “The trial began with six volunteers being injected with the potential vaccine in Melbourne on Tuesday.”
Researchers say that most of the experimental vaccines, which are undergoing trials, are designed to train the immune system to recognize the “spike” protein that studs the virus’ outer surface, priming the body to react if it was exposed to the real virus
Some vaccines are designed using the genetic code for that protein, while others use a harmless virus to deliver the protein-producing information. Other experimental vaccines are more old-fashioned, developed with the dead, whole virus.
Novavax uses another new kind to that list, which is called a recombinant vaccine. The company used genetic engineering to grow harmless copies of the coronavirus spike protein in the lab. The researchers then extracted and purified the protein, packaging it into virus-sized nanoparticles.
Last month, Novavax told The Associated Press, “The way we make a vaccine is we never touch the virus” but ultimately “it looks just like a virus to the immune system.” The company used the same procedure to develop a nanoparticle flu vaccine, which recently completed the last stage of clinical trials.
