AstraZeneca announced on Thursday that it expects to have a new version of the COVID-19 vaccine ready for use in the last quarter of this year, as drug manufacturers respond to emerging variants of the disease that could be more transmissible or more resistant to existing vaccines.
The Anglo-Swedish company, which is developing a vaccine developed by Oxford University, said it is working with university scientists to adapt the vaccine to combat new variants.
The researchers began this work months ago, when variants were first detected, said Mene Pangalos, head of biopharmaceutical research at AstraZeneca.
“We are moving fast and we have a series of versions compared to the variants in the works, which we will choose as we move to the clinical part,” Pangalos said in a teleconference with reporters.
For his part, the CEO of the pharmaceutical company, Pascal Soriot, defended the company’s efforts to develop and increase vaccine production amid warnings from the European Union and a preliminary study, which raised doubts about the ability of the injection to fight a variant of COVID-19 first discovered in South Africa.
Although the launch of the AstraZeneca vaccine was not perfect, regulators in several countries considered it safe and effective. The company will produce 100 million doses this month, Soriot said.
Only a handful of vaccines have been authorized for widespread use out of the hundreds that began development last year, he stressed.
“One hundred million doses in February means 100 million vaccines, which means hundreds of thousands of serious infections that are prevented and thousands of deaths that are avoided,” Soriot said.
Although the European Medicines Agency has approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for use by anyone over the age of 18, some European countries – including France and Germany – have recommended that people over the age of 65 not receive the vaccine due to limited data on their effectiveness in older adults.