Following unsuccessful Phase 2 trials of the coronavirus vaccine being developed by French pharmaceutical company Sanofi along with Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline, the developers of Russia’s Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine have offered to assist Sanofi-GSK with their research.
Sputnik News notes that this is not the first time that the Russian Gamaleya research institute, where the Sputnik V vaccine was developed, has offered to share its knowledge and expertise with foreign companies. A few weeks ago, it made a similar offer to UK pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, suggesting that a combination of Sputkik V and AZ’s vaccines could prove more effective than each one separately. AstraZeneca announced this week that it would be taking Gamaleya up on its offer.
Sanofi-GSK has yet to issue a reply to Gamaleya, but this setback in their own vaccine development will have been a grave disappointment, as it means that Phase 3 trials will now have to be postponed indefinitely, until a repeat of Phase 2 trials produce the desired results.
In a statement, Thomas Triomphe, Executive Vice President of Sanofi Pasteur, said: “We care greatly about public health which is why we are disappointed by the delay announced today, but all our decisions are and will always be driven by science and data. We have identified the path forward and remain confident and committed to bringing a safe and efficacious COVID-19 vaccine. Following these results and the latest encouraging new preclinical data, we will now work to further optimize our candidate to achieve this goal.”
440 adults participated in Sanofi-GSK’s Phase 2 trials, and this week, the companies announced that the vaccine had produced an “insufficient immune response in older adults … [although] an immune response comparable to patients who recovered from Covid-19 in adults aged 18 to 49 years” was recorded.
The companies now plan to initiate a Phase 2b trial in February, 2021, and are hoping that the vaccine will reach the market by late that same year.
Unlike the vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer, those designed by Gamaleya and Sanofi-GSK use older, more deeply understood vaccine technology. They also share the advantage that the vaccine can be stored at a normal range of temperatures, rather than the minus 70 degrees Celsius required by Pfizer’s vaccine doses. And the fact that the concept behind the vaccine has already been used in vaccines for a variety of diseases over the past decades will also be reassuring to many. The technology used by Moderna and Pfizer, by contrast, “messenger RNA,” has never before been used in vaccines, and as such, the longer-term side effects are impossible to predict.