RE: CEPI announcement tomorrow9 Mar 2021 17:02
'Initially we were thinking about the next-generation vaccines as just offering attributes that you would want in vaccines for managing Covid for the long term. So, you know, low cost. Ideally in a single dose. Ease of administration might be factors. More thermal-stable products. But I think the introduction of the variants also forces us to think about multivalent vaccines [meaning they would protect against several strains of the virus] or vaccines that can be easily turned from one strain to another if we get into that kind of a dynamic.'
'Flu vaccines have to be updated virtually annually, and their efficacy is far from ideal. It would be such a missed opportunity if the world follows that paradigm again and then never comes up with a pan-coronavirus vaccine. Wouldn’t it be better to not follow the flu path if we didn’t need to?
The answer is yes. And I think you will be pleased to hear that we are very shortly going to be putting out a call for proposals around … we’re calling them fully protective betacoronavirus vaccines, which seem to be the main threat. [Both SARS-1, which caused a less widespread outbreak in 2003, and SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid, are betacoronaviruses.]
There’s been quite a buzz about that recently. Our timing seems to have been good. I mean, we’ve been working on gearing this initiative up for some time and didn’t know that all these efforts were going to be attracting the attention that they’ve attracted in the last month or so. But there are at least 20 groups around the world that are trying to move in that direction. And we’re going to be putting out a major initiative, and hopefully by the end of this month, actually.
But obviously, we don’t know what the art of the possible is. And I think certainly in the near term, we need to be thinking about different strategies for ensuring that we can provide protection against the emerging variants.'
Just think we kinda... fit
Sign In
Follow the stocks
