Trial of Coronavirus Vaccine Made by Moderna Begins in Seattle

The participants will be followed for a year, but Stéphane Bancel, the chief executive of Moderna, said in an interview that safety data would be available a few weeks after the injections were given. If the vaccine then appears safe, he said, Moderna will ask the Food and Drug Administration for permission to move ahead to the next phase of testing even before the first stage is finished.

The second round of testing, to measure efficacy as well as to verify safety, will include many more participants.

Moderna, with headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., and a manufacturing plant in nearby Norwood, is already buying new equipment so that it will able to produce millions of doses. Mr. Bancel acknowledged that the company was taking a risk, because neither safety nor efficacy has been proved yet.

“Humans are suffering and time is of the essence,” he said. “Every day matters. We have taken these decisions to take the risk, because we believe it is the right thing to do.”

The company’s stock price jumped in February in response to news reports about the vaccine. And on Monday, Moderna’s stock rose more than 24 percent, rising $5.19 to close at $26.49.

Work on the vaccine started in January, as soon as Chinese scientists posted the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus on the internet. Researchers at Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases identified part of the sequence that codes for a spike-like protein on the surface of the virus that attaches to human cells, helping the virus to invade them.

A nonprofit group, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, helped pay to manufacture the vaccine for the trial.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/health/coronavirus-vaccine.html