A new step towards the marketing of a French vaccine against Covid-19.
Sanofi announces this Thursday the start of large-scale trials for its main anti-Covid-19 vaccine project, developed with the British GSK.
The French pharmaceutical group also confirms that it is counting on a launch at the end of 2021, after already several months of delay.
"Sanofi and GSK are starting an international phase 3 study to assess the effectiveness of their candidate vaccine against (the) Covid-19," said Sanofi in a press release, ten days after the announcement of encouraging results at the end of first tests.
The latter, called phase 2 and carried out on a few hundred people, had shown that this vaccine causes the production of antibodies against the coronavirus in most of the subjects to whom it has been injected.
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The trials announced this Thursday should now give a real idea of the effectiveness against Covid-19 of this vaccine, for which GSK provides the adjuvant.
They will be carried out with some 35,000 people in multiple countries, including the United States.
Sanofi prepares for the start of production
If the results are favorable, Sanofi, which is already preparing the production of this vaccine, counts on an approval in the fourth quarter by the main health authorities.
This means that, in the best-case scenario, Sanofi's vaccine will be launched almost a year after the first vaccines distributed in the Western world against the coronavirus, those from Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna.
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This late arrival is explained by malfunctions in the development of the vaccine by Sanofi, which suffered a setback of several months.
Since then, the group has continued to ensure that its product will find its place all the same.
As such, he will both assess whether this vaccine is effective against the so-called South African variant, one of the main new strains of the virus, and whether it is used as a booster after another vaccine. Sanofi's serum uses recombinant proteins, a technology different from the vaccines already approved. Sanofi is also developing another vaccine, with messenger RNA this time like those from Pfizer and Moderna, which is still at an early stage.
