Moderna Therapeutics co- founder and CEO Noubar Afeyan hopes the early results of COVID-19 vaccine testing will come in spring.
The first human trials started about two weeks ago. The first wave of testing involves 45 volunteers in three different dose groups, Afeyan said during the online webinar “COVID-19: Challenging General Fear.
He added that in the second stage they will be trying to establish what the ultimate dose of the vaccine should be.
Afeyan noted that the company had been working on coronavirus vaccines for two years, and when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, in the very early stags Moderna was asked to very rapidly to try to come up with a vaccine.
He said huge investments are needed, and they have already started making them, including through cooperation with different agencies and the US government to be able to produce large quantities.
He hopes the company will be able to have enough material, should the need arise to provide some of these vaccines to front-line healthcare workers.
“It’s very hard to avoid giving hope, when everyone wants hope. And we are very careful, and we say that we do hope that what we are doing and what everyone else is doing works and we are able to make enough vaccines to supply the world,” Noubar Afeyan stated.
“This is absolutely not a competition between different companies, this is a competition between us and the virus,” he stated.
He described the fight against the virus as kind of a war between a social animal and an invader that uses our social contact to transmit itself.
“ It’s an attack on our social being. If we were not social animals, if we were trees this would not have happened. We are not going to lose our socialness, but we are going to suffer casualties because of this,” he state.
Aurora Prize Co-Founders Noubar Afeyan and Ruben Vardanyan, Lord Ara Darzi, Armenia’s Heath Minister Arsen Torosyan, Managing Partner of McKinsey & Company André Andonian, WHO special envoy for COVID-19 Dr. David Nabarro participated in the online webinar “COVID-19: Challenging General Fear.”
