Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
As everyone knows, there have been a lot of attempts to repurpose existing therapies for the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve covered several of these along the way, but it’s time for some updates. The work that’s been going on not only adds to our knowledge about treatment for infected patients, but it should – ideally – Read More
In a bit of a surprise move, Pfizer and their partner BioNTech announced yesterday that they were moving their BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine candidate forward into Phase II/III trials. The surprise was because all the publications from this effort so far had been on another one of their four candidates, BNT162b1. Fans keeping score at home will know… Read More
And now we have more data on the CanSino vaccine, another adenovirus vector (but this one using Ad5, a much more common one in the human population). Their initial Phase I data are discussed here. So what else do we know now? Well, that one was open label and non-randomized, whereas this one is fully controlled. Read More
The hype began building late last week around the Oxford vaccine results released today, and I will confess to wondering just what was going on. The British press has a history of going berserk over drug research – I wouldn’t care to count how many times Alzheimer’s “breakthroughs” have hit the headlines over there, an… Read More
Recent posts here have gone into Moderna’s Phase I vaccine data, Pfizer’s Phase I vaccine data, what we don’t know yet about the relationship between T-cells, antibodies, and immunity to the coronavirus, and some new data that are starting to fill in those gaps. This morning comes a new preprint from the Pfizer/BioNTech team that… Read More
Well, it’s finally here – eight weeks to the day after press-releasing some top line results, the full paper is out on the Moderna mRNA vaccine candidate’s Phase I trial. I’m very glad to see it – it’s going to be very important for the full data sets on all the vaccine candidates to be… Read More
I wanted to point out an interesting interview given by Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla to Time. I have made some pointed remarks about Pfizer over the years, but this is one of the better Q&A pieces like this that I have seen – you’ll see why in some of the answers below. Bourla is actually… Read More
OK, it’s time to address the topic of challenge testing against the coronavirus epidemic. Let’s define our terms: by this, I mean “deliberately exposing volunteers to infection by the virus in order to evaluate prophylactic treatments by comparison to controls”. I will say at the outset that I am not in favor of this idea… Read More
We now have a preprint with a great deal of data on the first mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidate from the Pfizer/BioNTech effort. This is actually the first real data set on any of the genetic vaccines, since Moderna’s paper on their Phase I trial has not yet appeared (all we had was a brief press… Read More
I mentioned yesterday in my post about anti-vaccine arguments that there seemed to be suspicions on social media platforms about vaccine testing in Africa. I’ve been looking around for more of that, and finding plenty of it. I’ve also heard from a colleague with some pertinent thoughts about how these things get going, and I… Read More
