AstraZeneca strikes deal to mass produce Oxford Uni coronavirus vaccine for no profit – to help millions across world
A CORONAVIRUS vaccine that could save millions of lives across the world may be ready in just months, thanks to a landmark deal.
British pharma firm AstraZeneca will make and distribute the University of Oxford's potential COVID-19 vaccine on a "virtually free basis", if the trials in Oxford are deemed a success.
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“It is based on the assumption that each phase of trials goes according to plan, with an optimistic time frame at each of those stages.”
Second reason for hope
As the new vaccine continues through the development stage a drug used to treat Ebola patients has shown "very promising" early results in a trial of people admitted to hospital with coronavirus, scientists said.
Patients given remdesivir had a recovery time that was almost a third faster than those given a placebo, the first results from an international clinical trial showed.
Abdel Babiker, professor of epidemiology and medical statistics at UCL, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "These are very encouraging results from the first large-scale randomised trial to report on any treatment of Covid-19."
A second beacon of hope: could Ebola drug help Covid-19 patients recover faster?
A drug used to treat Ebola patients has shown "very promising" early results in a trial of people admitted to hospital with coronavirus, scientists said.
Patients given remdesivir had a recovery time that was almost a third faster than those given a placebo, the first results from an international clinical trial showed.
Abdel Babiker, professor of epidemiology and medical statistics at UCL, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "These are very encouraging results from the first large-scale randomised trial to report on any treatment of Covid-19."
He said the group of adults admitted to hospital with advanced coronavirus who received remdesivir recovered "much faster" than the group that received a placebo.
Preliminary results also suggested a survival benefit, with a lower mortality rate of 8 per cent for the group receiving the drug, compared with 11.6 per cent for the placebo group, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD) said.
More than 1,000 patients have been recruited across the world, including 46 from the UK, for the Adaptive Covid-19 Treatment Trial, which began at the start of April. Scientists involved in the study defined recovery as a patient being well enough to come off oxygen, being discharged from hospital or even returning to normal activity levels.
During the trial, which involved more than 70 hospitals across the globe, patients were given the antiviral drug every day for 10 days while they remained in hospital. Professor Mahesh Parmar, director of the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit at UCL, who oversaw the EU portion of the trial, said scientists will continue to gather further data while the early results are reviewed by regulators.
Prof Parmar said: "These results are very promising indeed. They show that this drug can clearly improve time to recovery.
"Before this drug can be made more widely available, a number of things need to happen: the data and results need to be reviewed by the regulators to assess whether the drug can be licensed and then they need assessment by the relevant health authorities in various countries.
"While this is happening, we will obtain more and longer term data from this trial, and other ones, on whether the drug also prevents deaths from Covid-19."
He said the group of adults admitted to hospital with advanced coronavirus who received remdesivir recovered "much faster" than the group that received a placebo.
Preliminary results also suggested a survival benefit, with a lower mortality rate of 8 per cent for the group receiving the drug, compared with 11.6 per cent for the placebo group, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD) said.
More than 1,000 patients have been recruited across the world, including 46 from the UK, for the Adaptive Covid-19 Treatment Trial, which began at the start of April.
Scientists involved in the study defined recovery as a patient being well enough to come off oxygen, being discharged from hospital or even returning to normal activity levels.
During the trial, which involved more than 70 hospitals across the globe, patients were given the antiviral drug every day for 10 days while they remained in hospital.
Professor Mahesh Parmar, director of the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit at UCL, who oversaw the EU portion of the trial, said scientists will continue to gather further data while the early results are reviewed by regulators.
Prof Parmar said: "These results are very promising indeed. They show that this drug can clearly improve time to recovery.
"Before this drug can be made more widely available, a number of things need to happen: the data and results need to be reviewed by the regulators to assess whether the drug can be licensed and then they need assessment by the relevant health authorities in various countries.
"While this is happening, we will obtain more and longer term data from this trial, and other ones, on whether the drug also prevents deaths from Covid-19."
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