German And US COVID-19 Vaccines Estimated To Be Ready By Year-end

Photo illustration (Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Good news comes from the process of making a vaccine for COVID-19. A company in Germany, BioNTech, is working with US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to start human trials of vaccines. According to both parties, this vaccine is said to have potential and can be supplied up to millions of vaccines by the end of 2020.

Launching CNN, Thursday, April 30, Pfizer said it would start testing the vaccine in the US as early as next week and said the vaccine was ready for emergency use in the fall. The German Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedical Medicine approved a trial which is the country's first clinical trial for a COVID-19 vaccine on April 22.

Mainz, Germany-based BioNTech reports that the first cohort of participants had been given a dose of the potential vaccine, BNT162, in a Phase 1/2 clinical study. As for the trial in the US, Pfizer and BioNTech said they would start the trial if regulatory approval had been issued, which is expected as soon as possible.

"A total of 12 study participants have been vaccinated with the BNT162 vaccine candidate in Germany since the start of the study on April 23, 2020," BioNTech said in a statement.

Until now, there is no information about the results of these experiments. BioNTech said about 200 healthy respondents aged 18 to 55 would be given doses ranging from 1 microgram to 100 micrograms to find the optimal dosage for further study. "In addition, the safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine will be investigated."

"The two companies plan to jointly conduct clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccine candidates that are in Europe and the US and at several research sites," Pfizer added in its first-quarter report.

"The company estimates that there is potential to supply millions of doses of vaccine by the end of 2020, depending on the technical success of the development program and approval by regulatory authorities and the potential to increase capacity to produce hundreds of millions of doses by 2021."

Pfizer is not the only group carrying out trials of a potential COVID-19 vaccine. Last week, scientists at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, England, began testing the vaccine in humans and, if it depends on trial results, could be ready in early September.

Related parties said that more than 5 vaccine programs are in the clinical trial phase and more than 80 programs are in their early stages. Johnson & Johnson also hopes to have a vaccine ready for emergency use by early 2021.

Tremendous efforts are underway to shave off the time from testing vaccines that normally take years. In early March, the leader of the US COVID-19 response team, Anthony Fauci, said it would take up to 18 months at the earliest to develop a vaccine. But experts warn of the risks of cutting out the testing phase, such as the animal testing phase.

Some groups have found other ways to streamline vaccine studies. India's vaccine maker, the Serum Institute, is preparing 40 million units of the experimental vaccine used by Oxford, although it doesn't know if it will work.