Moderna's Covid vaccine keeping antibodies elevated for 3 months & counting; 20M target

Days after US biotech company Moderna said that it has submitted the results of its Coronavirus vaccine trials to the country's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to obtain emergency use authorisation for the vaccine, a study has shown that it causes the human immune system to produce potent antibodies that last for at least three months.

'The injections were received 28 days apart'

Researchers at the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), studied the immune response of 34 adult participants, young and old, from the first stage of a clinical trial. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, they said that the antibodies, which stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus from invading human cells, "declined slightly over time, as expected, but they remained elevated in all participants 3 months after the booster vaccination."

"We recently reported the results of a phase 1 trial of a messenger RNA vaccine, mRNA-1273, to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2; those interim results covered a period of 57 days after the first vaccination. Here, we describe immunogenicity data 119 days after the first vaccination (90 days after the second vaccination) in 34 healthy adult participants in the same trial who received two injections of vaccine at a dose of 100 μg. The injections were received 28 days apart," the study said.

20 million doses in the US by the end of 2020

According to media reports, NIAID director Anthony Fauci and other experts have said it's very likely that the immune system will remember the virus if re-exposed later on, and then produce new antibodies. The Moderna vaccine will be reviewed by an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on December 17. In addition to filing its US application, Moderna said it would seek conditional approval from the European Medicines Agency, which has already begun a rolling review of its data and would continue to talk with other regulators.

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Meanwhile, in a statement, Moderna re-affirmed its expectation of having approximately 20 million doses available in the U.S. by the end of 2020. Additionally, the Company expects to have between 100 million and 125 million doses available globally in the first quarter of 2021, with 85-100 million of those available in the U.S. and 15-25 million of those available outside of the U.S. These expected first-quarter doses are inclusive within the 500 million to up to 1 billion doses that the Company expects to manufacture globally in 2021.

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