AstraZeneca’s vaccine could be ready for large-scale trials by year-end, says CEO Pascal Soriot.
One day after Kate Bingham, chair of the U.K. Vaccine Taskforce, said only 4 million doses of the shot would be available by the end of the year, AstraZeneca’s Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot said the U.K. drugmaker is poised to unveil vaccine test results by year-end even after trials were slightly delayed over the summer as infection rates slowed in the northern hemisphere, Bloomberg reports.
“At the end of the day, we don’t yet know if the vaccine works,” Soriot said in a Bloomberg Television interview, adding that many questions remain, such as whether it will show results for everyone and for how long. “We would hope that large-scale vaccinations would be possible starting in January next year — possibly even December.”
AstraZeneca said it’s confident it can begin supplying hundreds of millions of doses on a “rolling basis” once a shot is cleared. According to Soriot, a recent resurgence has allowed scientists to gather the clinical data they need. Astra and the University of Oxford are keeping the vaccine in a frozen bulk state to preserve its shelf life while they await final test results.
Pfizer, which is developing its vaccine with Germany’s BioNTech SE, has said it may release initial late-stage trial data this month. The company is also waiting to hit a safety milestone, two months of data on half of participants, which it expects by the third week of November.
