Infectious disease
With widespread distribution of various vaccines against COVID-19 vaccine ongoing, companies are still refining their vaccines and therapies and generating new data. Here’s a look at two recent updates.
The announcement by the NIAID, a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is very unusual.
Jerusalem’s clinical-stage pharmaceutical company Oramed Pharmaceuticals is forming a joint venture with Premas Biotech to develop novel oral COVID-19 vaccine candidates.
Please check out the biopharma industry coronavirus (COVID-19) stories that are trending for March 23, 2021.
Per BioSpace’s 2020 U.S. Life Sciences Salary Report and 2020 U.S. Life Sciences Diversity & Inclusion Report, men out-earn women by 19.3%, which climbs to 47.6% when looking specifically at health care. Also, only 14% of women felt that opportunities for promotion were fair compared to 23% of their male counterparts.
AstraZeneca reported that the U.S. Phase III trial of the vaccine, AZD1222, demonstrated an efficacy of 79% at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 and 100% efficacy at preventing severe disease and hospitalization.
A COVID-19 nasal spray vaccine developed by Rokote Laboratories Finland Ltd., is preparing for Phase I trials in Finland…if it can win funding.
It was a relatively quiet week in terms of clinical trial news, but there were some significant releases. Here’s a look.
The results published in the NEJM state that pegcetacoplan met the study’s primary endpoint for efficacy, demonstrating an advantage over eculizumab with a statistically significant improvement in adjusted means of 3.8 g/dL of hemoglobin at week 16 (p<0.001). An impressive 85% of patients were transfusion free at 16 weeks, in contrast to only 15% of eculizumab-treated patients.
According to an interview with Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist, the new investigational COVID-19 vaccines rely on alternative technologies and systems of delivery. Some include oral and nasal administration, while others use skin patches.
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