48317770967_48ec28d656_b

Trump meets pharmaceutical executives to discuss COVID-19 vaccine

pharmafile | March 4, 2020 | News story | Research and Development COVID-19, Chinese Coronavirus, Trump, Wuhan Coronavirus, coronavirus 

President Trump has met with several representatives of the top pharmaceutical companies to discuss progress being made on a coronavirus vaccine.

Executives from Gilead Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline, Inovio pharmaceuticals, Moderna and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals were all in attendance.

Commenting on the gathering, Trump said: “They’re really working hard and they’re working smart. We had a great meeting with a lot of great companies. They’re going to have vaccines, I think, relatively soon, and they’re going to have something that makes you better, and that’s actually going to take place even sooner. I don’t know what the time will be. I’ve heard very quick numbers, that of months. And I’ve heard pretty much a year would be an outside number.”

However, Trump’s timeline does not seem realistic and Antony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that a deployable vaccine is “going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half.” This is backed up by the pharmaceutical companies with John Shiver, Senior Vice President of global vaccine R&D at Sanofi, who also attended the meeting, saying that a therapeutic for the virus could be developed “months or a very short amount of time, a year or so.”

Gilead’s drug remdesivir, originally developed for Ebola, has been tested since January on coronavirus patients and is currently in clinical trials.

Conor Kavanagh

 

Related Content

EMA accepts AstraZeneca’s regulatory submission for sipavibart for COVID-19 prevention

AstraZeneca has announced that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has accepted its Marketing Authorisation Application …

diana-polekhina-zbsthwt9vlc-unsplash_2

AstraZeneca shares results from phase 3 trial of COVID-19 prevention drug

AstraZeneca has announced positive high-level results from the SUPERNOVA phase 3 trial for a COVID-19 …

Vaccine image

Sanofi and Novavex sign exclusive $1.2bn licensing agreement to co-commercialise COVID-19 vaccine and develop flu-COVID-19 vaccines

French pharma and healthcare company Sanofi and US biotech Novavex, have entered into a co-exclusive …

Latest content