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Ruck - Happy Birthday

Miavoce - good to see you posting

……..and therein lies the rub Crumbs.

……….pity she didn't find Roche first too :)

The following is an excellent article from Helen Branswell aiming to manage expectations regarding what we can expect from COVID-19 vaccines. Some experts think it's unlikely that vaccines will achieve sterilizing immunity and prevent you from being infected but instead, will make the disease far less severe.

'“If we push the disease from pneumonia to a common cold, then I think that’s a huge step forward,” said Munster, chief of the virus ecology unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont.
The rush to develop vaccines means that ideal solutions may be out of reach in the immediate term; Munster said he anticipates seeing second-generation vaccines that could be more protective.'

https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/22/the-world-needs-covid-19-vaccines-it-may-also-be-overestimating-their-power/

WTP - No need whatsoever to apologise.

Scancell said in The Times article that they had applied to UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) who are responsible for handing out grants/funding.

https://www.ukri.org/

Merck to enter the COVID-19 vaccine field with the purchase of Austrian biotech. Themis who are developing another viral vector vax., this time using the measles virus.

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-inks-themis-buyout-to-join-covid-19-vaccine-race

Crumbs,

Article is essentially about lack of infected patients to prove efficacy in clinical trials and the prospect of chasing the virus around the UK and around the World. This is the part relevant to Scancell:-

'Cliff Holloway, chief executive of the biotech company Scancell, which is working on a separate vaccine with Nottingham University, said clinical trials would need to be extended and include more people if the number of those being exposed to the virus fell too low.
“One option would be to go to areas where the vaccine was still present, or include more people,” he said. “But that would be a lot more expensive.”'

Yes, BARDA, the US Government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority have given the project $1 billion and think you're right Chelsea, it's all about throwing everything you can at the disease. They have also funded other front projects such as the Moderna vaccine although with much lower amounts.

Chelsea,

AstraZeneca have confirmed that they are developing this vaccine and will supply it on a not for profit basis. Good on them.

Crumbs, think through the implications. It's cool water for all vaccines with clinical trials in countries that are bringing the vaccine under control. Wonder whether COVID-19 will go the way of SARS and just fade away - let's hope so.

CC - thanks and another great spot to add to your growing list.

Crumbs, yes and they're also the manufacturers of SCIB1.

Inanaco,

There is also an arm with a repeated dose of ChAdOx1 - so they're testing a single dose, multiple dose and prime boost regime - results will be interesting and as previously said, even if it's a fail then data will be valuable to others.

Ivy - interesting about Canarypox adenovirus vector - had never heard of it.

Nom - thanks for the link - excellent article and well worth a read. Point about safety is so important, any toxicity issues in an approved vaccine will be very damaging (anti-vax movement)

Finally Chelsea, sorry to hear you're struggling with current situation. Hopefully won't be for too much longer now, things seem to finally be improving.

Inanaco,

Re. your 9.57, I'm not sure whether it's correct to say that you can only give vaccines using chimpanzee adenoviruse vectors once - the ChAdOx1 clinical trial has an arm receiving 2 doses. Even if it is correct then I assume there is the possibility of using a prime boost dosing regime - who knows?

Nom

If you want to be absolutely accurate then, no regulator in the world, be it the FDA, the EMA, the MHRA. NPMA etc.etc. would allow a clinical trial that involved infecting humans with COVID-19 and therefore there would be zero chance of developing an approved vaccine.

Inanaco,

Yep, that's not specific to CanSino's trial, unlike preclinical testing in animals, you can't deliberately infect humans with COVID-19. Once patients have been vaccinated on a clinical trial, (and it should be randomised) all you can do is monitor them to see if/when they become infected and then you'll start to get an idea of how long immunity for your vaccine lasts and will be able to accurately identify the biomarkers from your trial that predicted efficacy.

That applies to all vaccines in development. The good news for the second generation of vaccines is that there will be so much more data available from the first wave of vaccines and so much more will be known about how COVID-19 operates at a molecular level and hopefully there may be accurate biomarkers for clinical trials that will shorten the approval process.

Correct Ivy, it's non-replicating

Inanaco,

Yes, the issue of pre-existing immunity to adenovirus 5 is the very reason why Oxford are using ChAdOx1 - it's a chimpanzee adenovirus and therefore humans won't have pre-existing immunity.

Knowledge of COVID-19's MOA seems to be increasing daily with new research. Up until now, as far as vaccines go, it has all been animal data and of course the real test will be how each vaccine performs in humans.

The big news is that CanSino became the first company to publish clinical trial results yesterday when they released results for the phase I of their viral vector vaccine and the world was able to see the first human data for a COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine was safe and produced immune responses which is encouraging but patients who had already been exposed to the viral vector had weaker responses. CanSino are using adenovirus 5 as their vector which is the common cold virus and it seems that patients who had already been exposed to this virus, had pre-existing immunity to it and their immune systems may have focused on the adenovirus 5 part of the vaccine rather than the SARS-Cov-2 proteins.

It will be interesting to see how they get on in phase II and good on them for the amazing speed with which they've taken this vaccine through phase I and published results.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31208-3/fulltext

WTP - no problems.

Seems a long time since we've discussed Scancell in connection with cancer. Abstracts have been released from ASCO (being held virtually) and there's an update from Merck with follow-up data from their KEYNOTE-054 clinical trial for Keytruda as an adjuvant therapy in melanoma.

For any new to Scancell, an adjuvant therapy is one given to patients with a very high risk of cancer returning after it has been surgically removed and this is the original intended setting for Scancell's lead product, SCIB1.

The Keytruda results are pretty impressive and worth a quick look - they show a clear benefit over placebo with 3 year recurrence free survival rates of 64% for Keytruda versus 44% for placebo. Interesting to see the difference between PD-L1 positive and negative tumours too. Wonder whether a combination therapy in this setting might help improve those survival figures still further?

https://meetinglibrary.asco.org/record/185762/abstract