OXFORD COVID VACCINE RESULTS 'MAY BE A MONTH AWAY' AFTER PFIZER TRIAL SUCCESS

 Evening Standard 10 November 2020 - by Nicholas Cecil and Ross Lydall

An intense race is on since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to find a vaccine to combat the coronavirus. A number of institutes and healthcare companies around the world are conducting tests faster than usual so as to bring a vaccine into the market by the end of 2020 or the first half of 2021. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a vaccine will be considered effective only if it is able to protect at least 50 percent of those vaccinated.

Results from the Oxford vaccine  trials may be less than a month away and it could still play a key part in ending the pandemic in the UK.

The Government has pre-ordered 100 million doses of the potential vaccine being developed by scientists at Oxford university and UK drugs firm AstraZeneca.

Interim findings from phase-3 trials are expected by “early December” if global trials, including in the UK, continue to see volunteers catching covid — enabling scientists to check that the vaccine is able to defeat the virus.

Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said yesterday’s breakthrough for the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine showed for the first time that it was possible to make a covid vaccine. He added: “Ideally we need several of these to be successful for the best possible results for humanity.”

The Oxford vaccine is being trialled in countries including the US, Brazil and South Africa.  

Professor Pollard told the Standard: “We are still hoping that we will be able to do the same sort of thing as Pfizer, do an interim look, before the end of the year. We are obviously going full speed to do that. But the science has to take its course. The combination of science and also the huge logistical challenge of pulling all the data together that will take some time to do. But we are making very good progress.

“I’m reasonably confident that we should get there before the end of the year, sadly because there is obviously so much disease in the various countries we are working [in].”

He declined to put a timetable for the phase-3 trial results.

The UK has secured early access to about 340 million vaccine doses from six potential candidates, including  40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which requires two jabs per person 21 days apart — potentially giving immunity 28 days after the first injection.  

The others in the Government’s portfolio are being made by Novavax (currently in phase 2 clinical trials), Janssen (phase 2), GSK/Sanofi Pasteur (phase 1) and Valneva (pre-clinical trials).

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: “We have got lots of irons in the fire. The other leading one is the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which we also will be ready to deploy should the data come through on that in a similar way.”

The Pfizer vaccine is a mRNA vaccine — similar to the one that Imperial College London researchers are trialling — but different from the Oxford adenovirus vaccine, which uses a weakened version of the virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees.

Unlike the Pfizer vaccine, which must be stored at -70C for up to 48 hours prior to use, the Oxford vaccine does not need such “rigorous” cold storage.

Professor Robin Shattock, who is leading Imperial’s vaccine trials, said the Pfizer results were a breakthrough for vaccines in general and “also demonstrates the speed and utility of RNA vaccines technology”. He said it was “hopefully the beginning of global efforts to control this pandemic”.