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
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 …
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 …
AstraZeneca withdraws COVID-19 vaccine Vaxzevria
UK-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has announced that is it voluntarily withdrawing its COVID-19 vaccine Vaxzevria …