PARIS (Reuters) – A COVID-19 vaccine candidate developed by Sanofi and the US group Translate Bio “will not be ready this year,” the French pharmaceutical chief executive told Le Journal du Dimanche.
Clinical trials of this vaccine, which will be based on a technology known as mRNA – on which lean approved vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna – are expected to begin this quarter.
In December of last year, Sanofi had said it aimed to “potential early approval” of the shot in the second half of 2021, after positive preclinical data.
“This vaccine will not be ready this year, but it could be useful at a later stage if the fight against variants continues,” said Paul Hudson.
The CEO gave no other details. Sanofi officials were not available for comment.
The news could mark another blow for Sanofi, which already faces the backlog of another candidate vaccine COVID-19 that it hopes to bring to patients and for which the company has joined the British GlaxoSmithKline.
The two groups surprised investors last year, warning that their traditional protein-based COVID-19 jab showed an insufficient immune response in older people, delaying its launch until the end of 2021.
To appease critics, Sanofi said last month that it had agreed to fill and pack millions of doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine starting in July.
It has been reported that around 108 million people have been infected with the new coronavirus worldwide and more than 2.4 million have died since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019, according to a Reuters count.
Countries around the world have embarked on mass vaccination programs since the beginning of the year, with mixed results, and are now faced with the emergence of several variant strains that compel them to move even faster.
Reporting by Matthias Blamont; Dominique Vidalon’s edition