AstraZeneca boss says vaccine by year’s end ‘still feasible’

The boss of AstraZeneca says the vaccine it is developing with Oxford could be available within months despite being forced to stop trials.

AstraZeneca’s boss says a vaccine could still be ready this year despite a voluntary pause to investigate a trial participant’s possible adverse reaction. Picture: AFP

THE chief executive of AstraZeneca has said that it is “still feasible” that the Covid-19 vaccine that it is developing with the University of Oxford could be available by the end of the year, despite being forced to stop trials.

Pascal Soriot, boss of the British drugs group, said that if an independent review being conducted permitted global trials to resume, they remained on track for submitting data to the regulator by the end of the year.

“Then, of course, it depends on how fast the regulator will review and give approval. So we could still have a vaccine by the end of this year or maybe early next year,” he said at an event hosted on Thursday by Tortoise Media in his first public comments since the trial was suspended.

Mr Soriot’s optimism came amid concerns about the prospects of one of the world’s most advanced Covid-19 vaccines, which suffered a setback this week as late-stage trials were paused to allow an investigation into an illness in a female participant in Britain. Mr Soriot, 61, said it was “really common” for vaccine trials to be stopped and restarted as safety was paramount. “The difference with other vaccine trials is the world is not watching them, of course. They stop, study and restart.”

Doctors will study details of the participant’s illness with a safety committee for review. The committee is independent of AstraZeneca and the university, the trial’s sponsor.

The participant is thought to have signs of transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord, but Mr Soriot said that this had not yet been diagnosed. He added that it was too early to say when the trial would restart.

“It [transverse myelitis] is a very rare event, so you will find people saying it is correlated and others saying it is not correlated,” he said. “Because it is a rare event, essentially you cannot determine fully, so the experts are probably debating this, whether it is related or not. What is true is you will see TM mentioned in the product information of several other [existing non-Covid-19] vaccines.”

The Anglo-Swedish AstraZeneca is one of the most valuable companies on the FTSE 100, with a market value of more than £100 billion ($176bn).

The vaccine, one of about 200 in development, has been described by the World Health Organisation as probably the world’s leading candidate. The Oxford vaccine, licensed to AstraZeneca for distribution, showed encouraging interim data from a trial of 1,077 healthy adults in July. It has progressed to larger studies in countries including the United States and Brazil.

Mr Soriot said that he would be the “first in line” if the vaccine was approved and that preparations by drugs companies to agree indemnification with governments was normal, designed to protect companies from spurious lawsuits. AstraZeneca has agreed to work on the vaccine “at cost” during the pandemic stage, but it could profit should the virus become endemic.

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The Times