Biotechnology company Novavax is still expecting results from its PREVENT-19 trial, a phase 3 trial of its Covid-19 vaccine in the United States and Mexico, sometime in April. The trial has enrolled 30,000 volunteers in more than 100 locations.
“Everyone signed up and now we’re looking at cases,” Dr. Gregory Glenn, president of research and development at Novavax, told CNN Tuesday.
“I think we will have completed that trial sometime in April. So we will have three pivotal studies to test our vaccine – that is extremely important to prove that your vaccine is safe and can work, ”said Glenn.
In January, the US biotech company announced that its Covid-19 vaccine was found to have an overall efficacy of 89.3% in a phase 3 clinical study conducted in the UK, where it was found to be 95.6% effective against the original coronavirus strain. and 85.6% of the variant strain first identified in the UK.
The coronavirus vaccine was not one of the first to be approved in the United States, as the company faced some challenges in building the workforce needed to develop such a new vaccine, Glenn said.
“We were a small company,” said Glenn.
In January last year, around the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the Maryland-based company recruited more staff to work on developing the Covid-19 vaccine in response to the health crisis, Glenn said.
“We had to recruit people and our funding was pretty low,” said Glenn. “In addition to all the challenges in developing the vaccine, which is very complicated, we had the challenge of building a business.”
Glenn added that Novavax “has now reached a very good point” building the business and developing the vaccine. The company still expects to apply for an emergency use permit for its Covid-19 vaccine sometime in the second quarter of this year.