According to results published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Moderna Inc.’s (NASDAQ:MRNA) COVID-19 vaccine produced antibodies to the coronavirus in all patients tested in an initial safety trial.
The neutralizing antibody levels produced were equivalent to the upper half of what’s seen in patients who get infected with the virus and recover.
Moderna’s vaccine is one of the farthest along in the trial process.
While stimulating production of neutralizing antibodies doesn’t prove a vaccine will be effective, it’s considered an important early step in testing.
Meanwhile, the side effects reported weren’t severe enough in the majority of patients to preclude further testing, according to the report by researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The initial results are from the first group of 45 patients who received the vaccine and evaluated three doses of the vaccine that were given in a two-shot regimen. The middle dose from this initial trial will be used in a large final-stage trial of the Moderna vaccine, called mRNA-1273, that is slated to begin on July 27.
Unlike traditional vaccines that inject a weakened or inactivated virus or a piece of a virus to trigger an immune response, the Moderna product uses genetic material called messenger RNA to cause cells to produce the coronavirus spike protein.
The goal is to produce antibodies to the virus that protect against the disease when someone is later exposed to the coronavirus.
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