Biotechnology company Novavax still expects to see results from its PREVENT-19 trial, a Phase 3 study of its Covid-19 vaccine in the United States and Mexico, sometime in April. The trial has enrolled 30,000 volunteers across more than 100 locations.
“Everybody’s enrolled and now we’re watching for cases,” Dr. Gregory Glenn, president of research and development for Novavax, told CNN on Tuesday.
“I think sometime in the April timeframe we’ll have finished that trial. So, we’ll have three pivotal trials testing our vaccine — that’s extremely important for evidence that your vaccine is safe and can work,” Glenn said.
In January, the American biotech firm announced that its Covid-19 vaccine was found to have an overall efficacy of 89.3% in a Phase 3 clinical trial conducted in the United Kingdom, where it was found to have 95.6% efficacy against the original coronavirus strain and 85.6% against the variant strain first identified in the UK.
The coronavirus vaccine was not among the first authorized in the United States because the company faced some challenges in building the staff needed to develop such a new vaccine, Glenn said.
“We were a small company,” Glenn said.
In January of last year, around the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the Maryland-based company recruited more staff to work on developing its Covid-19 vaccine in response to the health crisis, Glenn said.
“We had to recruit people, and our funding was kind of low,” Glenn said. “In addition to all the challenges of developing the vaccine, which is really complicated, we had the challenge to build a company.”
Glenn added that Novavax has “reached a really good point now” with building the company and developing the vaccine. The company still expects to apply for emergency use authorization for its Covid-19 vaccine sometime in the second quarter of this year.
