Biotech company Novavax is still expected to see results from its PREVENT-19 study, a phase 3 study of its Covid-19 vaccine in the United States and Mexico, sometime in April. The process enrolled 30,000 volunteers in over 100 locations.
“Everyone is signed up and we’re watching the cases now,” Dr. Gregory Glenn, president of research and development for Novavax, told CNN on Tuesday.
“I think that sometime in April we will have finished that process. So, we will have three essential testing studies for our vaccine – this is extremely important for proof that your vaccine is safe and can work, ”said Glenn.
In January, the US biotechnology company announced that its Covid-19 vaccine was shown to have an overall efficacy of 89.3% in a Phase 3 clinical trial in the United Kingdom, where it was found to have an efficacy of 95, 6% against the original coronavirus strain and 85.6% against the strain variant first identified in the United Kingdom.
The coronavirus vaccine was not among the first licensed in the United States because the company faced some challenges in building the staff needed to develop such a new vaccine, Glenn said.
“We were a small company,” Glenn said.
In January last year, at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the Maryland company recruited more staff to work on the development of the Covid-19 vaccine in response to the health crisis, Glenn said.
“We had to recruit people, and our funding was a little bit small,” Glenn said. “In addition to all the challenges of vaccine development, which is very complicated, we had the challenge of building a company.”
Glenn added that Novavax “has reached a very good time now” by building the company and developing the vaccine. The company still expects to apply for an emergency use authorization for the Covid-19 vaccine sometime in the second quarter of this year.