indica News Bureau-
American drug maker, Pfizer seems to be taking great strides in bringing COVID-19 vaccine to the mass. It claimed a vaccine could be ready by October-end this year.
The pharmaceutical company is conducting clinical trials with German firm BioNTech on several probable vaccines in Europe and the United States.
“If things go well, and the stars are aligned, we will have enough evidence of safety and efficacy so that we can…have a vaccine around the end of October,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was quoted as saying at the event by FierceBiotech.
Speakers at the event also included AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot, GlaxoSmithKline chief Emma Walmsley, Johnson & Johnson Chief Scientific Officer Paul Stoffels.
Each of these companies is working with their partners to develop a vaccine to prevent the disease.
While GSK has joined forces with Sanofi, AstraZeneca is backing the vaccine being developed at the University of Oxford. J&J is collaborating with the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to develop its vaccine.
This is the first time in human history where vaccines are developed at breakneck speed, and with all the major drug makers working together to make it happen.
Until today, there are more than 120 vaccines that have been proposed across the world. In that at least 10 are in clinical evaluation and 115 in pre-clinical evaluation.
WHO says, it is important to evaluate as many vaccines as possible as we cannot predict how many will turn out to be viable. To increase the chances of success, it is critical to test all candidate vaccines until they fail.
According to the report by Bourla, he underlines that the warnings from experts around the challenges that could be “daunting” as it evaluated that approximately 15 million vaccine doses would be needed to stop the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The short, less than four-month timeframe in which we’ve been able to move from pre-clinical studies to human testing is extraordinary and further demonstrates our commitment to dedicating our best-in-class resources, from the lab to manufacturing and beyond, in the battle against COVID-19,” he added.
In anticipation of a successful clinical development program, Pfizer and BioNTech are working to scale up production for global supply. The breadth of this program should allow the production of millions of vaccine doses in 2020, increasing to hundreds of millions in 2021, Pfizer said.
The coronavirus hasn’t slowed even a bit. Lockdowns and social distancing at best can only be a temporary solution. Vaccines are the only way for us to win this battle, and we are literally running out of time before it could claim another hundred thousand.
