Moderna’s CEO, Stephane Bancel, was boasting new data on Monday showing that his company’s vaccine remains effective in combating new variants of the coronavirus, even as it traced a long road ahead in the war against the pandemic.
The biotech firm’s study showed what it called “protective” immune responses both for the variant documented for the first time in the United Kingdom (B.1.1.7) and for the variant seen in South Africa (B.1.351).
Even so, Bancel made a rigorous assessment of the pandemic, saying there are good reasons to expect the need for continuous booster injections to protect against mutations that can spread other variants of SARS-Cov-2, the virus behind the global COVID outbreak. -19.
“I believe SARS-Cov-2 will remain with humans forever,” Bancel said in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live. “We will have to have reinforcements adapted to a virus, as we have for the flu. It’s the same thing, both are mRNA viruses and we will have to live with that forever ”.
The company announced on Monday that it was also starting a trial of an additional booster dose of its vaccine, out of caution to potentially strengthen the immune response against emerging strains.
Bancel noted that while the original two-dose vaccine did, in fact, preserve a protective response against the South African strain, the neutralizing antibodies decreased six-fold compared to previous variants.
However, Bancel said the vaccine still provides a stronger immune response than would be expected in patients contracting COVID-19, and the company has minimized fears that its vaccine would become ineffective against the latest strains.
Looking to the future, Bancel emphasized the importance of the booster dose, given the production capacity restrictions already reduced amid the deliveries of his two-dose vaccine.
“The big issue with reinforcement is going to be the dose,” he said. “Do you need 25 or 50 or 100 micrograms? The current product authorized by the FDA has 100 micrograms, twice: a prime and a boost. “
He reaffirmed Moderna’s original goal of delivering 100 million doses of vaccines to the United States by March, as planned. However, what studies have shown about reinforcement dosing can be very important when it comes to staying ahead of future variants.
“If the dose was 50 or 25 micrograms, which is possible because your immune system is already ready, you may not need to increase capacity much,” he said.
Setting the ‘standard of success’
It is clear that the future of the pandemic depends on several factors. Among the most pressing issues are the slow distribution of vaccines to the public and the timing of other vaccine approvals – including the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) candidate vaccine, which could occur in the next two weeks.
Bancel said another vaccine candidate joining the effort led by Moderna and Pfizer (PFE) could help shift the focus of his company’s ability to reinforce problematic variants in the fall.
“I hope that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine [comes] soon, ”he said, noting that Moderna’s mRNA vaccine technology led to a faster approval process than some others.
“Some technologies will not be fast enough. Think about it, some of the older technologies they are citing, said that they will not have a vaccine until the end of the year ”, he speculated.
As Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergency Program, recently noted, the virus is expected to continue to spread and mutate for some time while doses of the vaccine are administered. This makes controlling the virus a first step, but it is far from eliminating it completely.
“I don’t believe that we should start to define the elimination or eradication of this virus as the barrier to success,” Bancel told Yahoo Finance. “The barrier to success is reducing the virus’s ability to kill, to intern people, to destroy our economic (and) social life.”
Zack Guzman is an anchor of Yahoo Finance Live and also a senior writer who covers entrepreneurship, cannabis, startups and breaking news on Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.
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