American drugmaker Moderna revealed Thursday that it has begun work on developing a booster drug to fight COVID-19 and the flu at the same time. “Today we announce the first step of our innovative respiratory vaccine program with the development of a vaccine single dose combining a COVID-19 booster and a flu booster”, He specified in a release Moderna’s chief executive, Stéphane Bancel.
In addition, the company intends to add protections against other respiratory viruses, As the RSV, to create a annual injection that protects against all. In this sense, Moderna shared on his Twitter account some “positive preclinical data that demonstrate our ability to combine 6 messenger RNAs against 3 different respiratory viruses in a vaccine: booster against COVID-19 + booster against influenza + booster against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) ”.
Thus, Moderna’s objective, according to Bancel, is to develop a combined mRNA vaccine “So that people can receive in an injection, every fall, a highly effective protection against the most troublesome respiratory viruses”.
Today, we shared positive pre-clinical data demonstrating our ability to combine 6 mRNAs against 3 different respiratory viruses in 1 vaccine: COVID-19 booster + Flu booster + RSV booster. #mRNA pic.twitter.com/6AEkhSJrO5
– Modern (@moderna_tx) September 9, 2021
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Third dose against COVID-19
Meanwhile, the company is waiting to obtain the authorization from the health and European authorities to manage a third booster dose against COVID-19. Last week, he delivered the first results of its clinical trials with the objective of obtaining this approval. “We are pleased to have requested a conditional marketing authorization from the European Medicines Agency for our candidate booster vaccine at the 50 microgram dose level”, He assured last Friday in a Press release the American pharmacist.
Bancel noted that additional studies and analyzes “show that a 50 microgram booster dose” of its COVID-19 vaccine “causes strong antibody responses against the “Delta” variant of coronavirus. The company also explained that it had modified the second phase of the clinical study to include the third dose administered. “Approximately” six months after the second.
On August, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) It started to recommend the use of a third dose for the people with a weakened immune system, as patients of organ transplant, people with VIH or some sick of Cancer, who did not register an adequate immune response to the first two vaccines. A This recommendation was also shared in September by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine emergency use authorizations (US) have been amended to allow the use of an additional dose in certain individuals. https://t.co/8yKJ49b0Sk pic.twitter.com/Vqb654vcp9
– US FDA in Spanish (@FDAenEspanol) August 13, 2021
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Recently, the US authorities also announced plans to start offering the booster dose to the general population you have received the mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer), starting the week of September 20 for those who have taken the two initial doses more than eight months ago. However, this still must be approved by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, in English) of the country.
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