Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States' leading infectious disease expert, stated he is positive about the Moderna upcoming COVID-19 vaccine trial data.
Fauci's announcement resulted in shares in Moderna increasing by 7 percent in early trading on Thursday.
According to the U.S. drugmaker on Wednesday, it has adequate cases to commence the first interim analysis of its novel coronavirus vaccine named mRNA-1273.
Moderna has remarked they are projected to have information to report by the end of November on their coronavirus vaccine program. The company stated they require 53 patients in the study to have tested positive for COVID-19, and the trial reached the figure recently, reported Pharma Live.
According to Fauci, the recent Pfizer readout was good news for Moderna. "Moderna has an almost identical mRNA. We hope we're going to see a similar kind of result from Moderna. If we do, then we'll have two vaccines in play."
Moderna would start evaluating data from the third phase of its vaccine trials within a week.
Fauci said, "We were told that literally in the next few days to a week they'll be doing the same thing of looking at the data as the Pfizer people did a week ago," reported The Hill.
Fauci's optimism follows reports on Monday that the vaccine candidate being created by Pfizer and BioNTech has proven to be 90 percent effective at eradicating the infection.
He stated that Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine candidate might produce a similar degree of efficacy to its predecessor, reported Mass Device.
The drug developer's vaccine trial reached its goal to initiate its first interim analysis after witnessing a remarkable increase in the rate of infections in the previous week.
Moderna had aimed to initiate an interim analysis of the COVID-19 vaccine's potency following 53 trial participants that have contracted the virus. However, it says it now expects "substantially more" participants in the trial, meaning the results' statistical strength would be stronger.
The company is having a clinical trial underway of 30,000 participants. Half of them are receiving the vaccine, and half are receiving a placebo, which is a shot of saline that has no effects.
For the vaccine to be considered for authorization by the United States Food and Drug Administration, at least 53 participants are required to be ailing from COVID-19.
According to a spokesman for the company working with the National Institutes of Health on the vaccine, the independent data safety monitoring board supervising the study would have the data in mere days and not weeks. The duration of their analysis was not made clear.
On Wednesday, the NIAID director said that he would be surprised if MRNA's candidate did not exhibit a similar level of effectiveness to Pfizer (PFE) and BioNTech's (BNTX) vaccine candidate.
Fauci's hopeful message for those ailing from COVID-19 fatigue is that "the cavalry is coming" in the form of a vaccine and that help is on its way.
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