Research for the development of the vaccine for COVID-19 treatment started several months ago and few vaccine candidates have reached human trials after a long period of research.
One of them is ChAd0X1 nCoV-19, a COVID-19 vaccine candidate being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca is found to be safe and produced a strong immune response in its first clinical trials of 1,077 healthy adults. The Antibodies in participants peaked by day 28 and remained high until the last day of testing on day 56 as per the research papers published in The Lancet on Monday.
A sub-group of 10 participants that received a second dose of the vaccine candidate produced even stronger antibody responses.
The vaccine candidate also resulted in “marked increases” in T-cell responses as early as day 7 of the vaccine intake that was noted to be present on the final day of testing. It also being reported that producing a strong T-cell response might be crucial to producing any form of lasting immunity to COVID-19.
The research vaccine caused minor side effects in 70% of recipients, most commonly fatigue and headache, but these were treatable with paracetamol (acetominophen), the authors said.
In another positive news to COVID-19 vaccine research a second vaccine candidate being developed by CanSino Biologics in Wuhan, China was also reported in The Lancet today.
Initial results for the vaccine trials of 508 healthy adults found that more than 96% of participants developed antibodies, while over 90% had T cell responses.
While these results from the early phases are promising, it’s still too early to know if either vaccine offers sufficient protection from COVID-19 infection or how long can these vaccines offer protection against the infection.
