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French pharmaceuticals giant Sanofi on Wednesday said its COVID-19 vaccine has provided positive results after almost a year of delay. The vaccine has been developed by Sanofi in collaboration with Britain’s GSK.
Now, the two drugmakers stated that they will seek regulatory authorisation for their COVID-19 vaccine in the United States and the European Union after phase 3 trials. Witnessing the participation of thousands of people, the trials resulted that Sanofi's vaccine was 100 percent effective against severe COVID-19 illness and hospitalisation.
According to a statement issued by Sanofi, the vaccine was more than 50 percent sufficient against all symptomatic COVID-19. In this regard, Sanofi’s vice-president for vaccines Thomas Triomphe also stated that the data was “similar to the recent clinical data from authorised vaccines”.
He further stressed that no other phase 3 study of the vaccine has been undertaken during this period amid concerns of multiple variants of COVID-19, including Omicron.
Following this announcement, Sanofi's share price rose by nearly 1.5 percent on the Paris stock exchange at midday.
If the vaccine is approved by the US and EU, it will bring an end to Sanofi's long-running efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine after numerous setbacks.
Originally, the French pharma was expecting to announce positive results of trials by mid-2021.
However, the data was pushed back by six months due to a dosing error. Late last year it was delayed again due to difficulties in finding people who had never been infected with COVID-19 to participate in the trials.
Furthermore, Sanofi had also abandoned a prior vaccine project based on mRNA technology which has been used by its rivals Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.
Currently, Sanofi has been focusing on developing a vaccine using a slightly less innovative technique based on recombinant protein technology. This technology has been reportedly used in the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine which is about to be launched in France.
Sanofi is expecting its vaccine to appeal more to unvaccinated people who have shown resistance towards mRNA technology, despite studies and reports of its effectiveness.
In the statement, GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccines head Roger Connor said that the vaccine “uses a well-established approach that has been applied widely to prevent infection with other viruses including pandemic flu”.
The EU has placed an order of millions of doses of vaccine and Sanofi is looking forwards to playing a significant role in booster vaccination campaigns around the world.
SOURCE: Khaleej Times