Merck is shutting down the development of its coronavirus vaccines after clinical research has yielded disappointing results, the drugmaker said on Monday.
Early-stage studies found that Merck’s two experimental injections produced “inferior” immune responses to those generated by other COVID-19 vaccines, the company said.
Candidate vaccines also elicited weaker immune responses than those seen after someone is naturally infected with the virus, although the vaccines were “generally well tolerated”, according to a Merck press release.
Merck’s stock price fell 1.2 percent on the news to $ 80.00 in the pre-trading market starting at 8:02 am
Merck said it will now focus its anti-pandemic efforts on researching and producing the two COVID-19 treatments it is planning.
The New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant struck a $ 356 million deal to supply the U.S. government with one of these drugs, known as MK-7110, which has been shown to reduce the risk of death or respiratory failure in hospitalized coronavirus patients by more than 50 Percent .
Merck is also conducting clinical trials for an antiviral drug known as Molnupiravir. The completion of these studies is scheduled for May, and data on the drug’s effectiveness should be available in the first quarter of this year. Merck said it will announce these results publicly if they are “clinically significant”.
“We are grateful to our employees who worked with us on these vaccine candidates and to the volunteers in the tests,” said Dr. Dean Y. Li, president of Merck Research Laboratories, in a statement. “We are firm in our commitment to contribute to the global effort to ease the burden of this pandemic on patients, health systems and communities.”
Merck was working on a single-dose coronavirus vaccine, like the one developed by Johnson & Johnson, which is expected to ask the feds to release their chance for emergency use in the coming weeks. The two-dose vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have already obtained these approvals in the USA.
One of Merck’s vaccines used the so-called vesicular stomatitis virus to deliver the coronavirus peak protein to the body and elicit an immune response. The company used the same technology in its Ebola vaccine, the first of its kind approved for use in humans.
Merck’s other vaccine candidate used a measles virus as a Trojan horse to trigger an immune response to COVID-19.