With many countries struggling to contain the COVID-19 virus, this has spurred many companies around the world to figure out a treatment and vaccine for the virus. In what has been hailed as unprecedented, a first potential vaccine has been sent for human trials earlier this year.
The good news is that it looks like we might have another potential vaccine on our hands which has also recently entered the human testing phase. Developed by Inovio Pharmaceuticals (a company backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), the vaccine has been accepted by the FDA and will now enter Phase 1 clinical trials.
The company claims that initial testing done on animals has yielded positive results where it showed an increase in immune response. The company has actually been working on this for a while now where the drug was initially developed as a potential vaccine candidate for MERS, meaning that they did not necessarily have to start from scratch.
Assuming the first clinical trials are successful, Inovio believes that they should be able to scale up their operations where they could produce as many as one million doses of the vaccine by the end of the year, where it can be used for additional trials as well as emergency use pending authorization.
That being said, it could be only next year where the vaccine might be ready for the general population. This was stated by Moderna, the company that developed the other vaccine, although they did state that it could potentially be ready for use by healthcare workers as early as this fall.
Filed in . Read more about Coronavirus, Covid-19, Health and Social Hit. Source: techcrunch