Pharmaceutical companies across the world are putting in their best efforts to advance their best ideas for fighting coronavirus.
Moderna Therapeutics is leading the race to become the first drug maker to start a clinical trial of an investigational drug against COVID-19.
The phase 1 test set will start as early as April for its messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, mRNA-1273, which has already been sent to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a centre under the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
Moderna, founded in 2010, is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company that is focused on drug discovery and drug development based on messenger RNA.
The vaccine will be tested at NIAID on several dozen healthy patients to assess safety and immune response. Hundreds of healthy-volunteers will determine the effectiveness of the vaccine against infection.
Moderna team was able to deliver a vaccine candidate for first batch of clinical trial in 42 days from sequence identification.
Moderna team is working in collaboration with NIAID and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a global alliance financing and coordinating the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases.
Meanwhile, at a meeting with top executives of pharmaceutical companies at the White House, President Donald Trump exhorted the companies to collaborate to speed the process of getting a vaccine and therapeutics to victims of the virus.
Though the company leaders indicated a willingness to cooperate with one another, they did not lay out how that would happen.
"This is all hands on deck. And the news out of this meeting that you've already formed a consortia ... now we know they will be working together to create therapeutics and ultimately a new vaccine," Vice President Mike Pence told Reuters.
President Trump pressed the representatives at the table about their time frames for getting a vaccine ready and took upbeat comments from some of the company leaders to mean that it could be ready to deploy within months.
