Biotechnology company Novavax still expects to see results from its PREVENT-19 trial, a Phase 3 study of its Covid-19 vaccine in the United States and Mexico, sometime in April. The trial has enrolled 30,000 volunteers across more than 100 locations.
“Everybody's enrolled and now we're watching for cases,” Dr. Gregory Glenn, president of research and development for Novavax, told CNN on Tuesday.
“I think sometime in the April timeframe we'll have finished that trial. So, we'll have three pivotal trials testing our vaccine -- that's extremely important for evidence that your vaccine is safe and can work,” Glenn said.
In January, the American biotech firm announced that its Covid-19 vaccine was found to have an overall efficacy of 89.3% in a Phase 3 clinical trial conducted in the United Kingdom, where it was found to have 95.6% efficacy against the original coronavirus strain and 85.6% against the variant strain first identified in the UK.
Novavax is also developing a booster shot to its coronavirus vaccine, and company officials anticipate that vaccinated people might need boosters every six months or annually to stay protected against Covid-19. Similar to others, Novavax's Covid-19 vaccine is administered as two doses given three weeks apart.
After the second dose, “we’re seeing that at six months, there's a pretty big decline in antibodies and I think all the vaccine makers are going to see that," Glenn said.
“But it's our view that somewhere between six months and one year, we’re going to need to boost everybody to protect them,” Glenn said. “I think governments are gearing up for that kind of thinking -- but we're still collecting the information that will guide that. This is a new virus, these are new vaccines, and we just don't have enough information.”
Novavax has initiated a booster shot study to gather that information.
"We have actually started a trial where some of the people who got our vaccine last summer, at six months later we're giving them a boost," Glenn said. "We're going to see how good that looks in terms of immune responses -- and it can either be one dose, given once, or maybe we kind of repeat the same thing we did before where we give them a three-week interval."
The company is currently manufacturing its vaccine at 10 sites in eight countries -- with two sites in the United States, in North Carolina and Texas, Glenn said.
