According to a team of researchers, a COVID-19 vaccine that can easily be produced at a local level in low and middle income countries has been showing great results in all the early clinical trials.
It is called the NDV-HXP-S vaccine and is being developed at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
This new, innovative vaccine uses an engineered version of the Newcastle disease virus, which is harmless and now also studded with coronavirus spike proteins in order to train the immune system to recognize the COVID-19 virus when it truly does try to attack the human body.
The scientists involved in this project used blood samples from all of the trial participants and were able to find that the vaccine induces more virus neutralizing antibodies and fewer non-neutralizing ones than all of the currently available anti-COVID vaccines.
All of this information and more was shared yesterday on medRxiv and the research is currently awaiting peer reviews.
Mount Sinai’s Florian Krammer stated that “The NDV-HXP-S vaccine induced neutralizing antibody responses against wild type (the original) SARS-CoV-2 that matched what we see after mRNA vaccination, but the proportion of neutralizing antibodies in the response was higher for NDV-HXP-S.”
The NDV-HXP-S vaccine can be made just like the flu vaccines, without the need for huge investments, in chicken eggs at influenza vaccine manufacturing plants located all over the world, the team of researchers shared.
The early clinical trials with a live version are currently on their way in the United States and in Mexico.
Furthermore, an inactivated version is now being tested in Thailand, Vietnam and Brazil, as per a spokesperson for the team of researchers.
Finally, there are also mid stage trials going on for the inactivated vaccine – these have already been completed and pivotal randomized ones are also being planned at this time.
