The European Medicines Agency has yet to approve its marketing.
The Commission has placed an advance order for 200 million doses of the anti-Covid vaccine developed by the US pharmaceutical company Novavax, NVX-CoV2373, in its official terminology.
What are the particularities of this new vaccine?
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The American biotech has chosen the protein vaccine, or recombinant protein. Unlike messenger RNA (Pfizer, Moderna) or Adenovirus (Janssen and AstraZeneca) vaccines, this fairly standard technology consists of manufacturing a virus protein, in this case the Spike protein, in the laboratory, and then inoculating it into cells. of the body to stimulate the immune system. The whole difficulty of this technique lies in the "
artificial
"
manufacture
of the Spike proteins. To do this, scientists will use cells whose DNA they modify by genetic engineering so that they produce the protein in question. We then speak of cells with recombinant or recombinant DNA, which is why we call "
recombinant proteins
".
»The molecules they produce.
Novavax is not the only pharmaceutical industry to have chosen this technology for its anti-Covid vaccine, since the one that Sanofi also uses.
The French company indeed has good expertise in this area.
She has already developed her hepatitis B vaccines, for example, with this technology.
Promising efficiency
The vaccine developed by Novavax should a priori have good efficacy against the coronavirus, approaching the excellent protection rates of messenger RNA vaccines.
The American laboratory declared in mid-June that its vaccine showed "
100% protection against moderate and severe forms of the disease and 90.4% overall
", according to phase 3 clinical trials, the latest of large scale carried out on a sample of nearly 30,000 people.
Read also: Covid-19: are vaccines less effective against the Delta variant?
Still according to the conclusions of these clinical trials, the vaccine would be 93% effective against so-called “
worrying
” variants and “
to be monitored
”
variants
, according to the WHO classification.
At the time of the study, in April, however, the Delta variant was not yet in the majority.
Currently, it is the most common strain of the virus in Western European countries.
Storage facility
One of the main advantages of Novavax vaccine technology is its ease of storage, and therefore of transport. Unlike other vaccines, such as BioNTech-Pfizer, whose storage requires a very low temperature, this one can be stored between 2 and 8 ° C. This could make it easier to transport and administer it in less developed countries. As the vaccine campaign in Western countries is well advanced, their vaccine needs will be less important. The late arrival of new vaccines could therefore benefit less developed countries more.
The contract signed by the company Novavax with the European Union is the seventh of this type after the four already authorized by the European Medicines Agency (BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Janssen) and that of the French Sanofi, which should arrive by the end of the calendar year, and that of the German Curevac.
Currently, 60% of the population of the European Union has received at least one dose of the vaccine.