Although snail paced in the development, the worlds two largest vaccine manufacturing giants France based Sanofi and UK based GlaxoSmithKline plc on Thursday morning announced that they entered the phase 1 and 2 of human clinical trials in the US.
The two pharma companies anticipated that they might fetch trial results by December, and are keen to start a Phase 3 trial subsequently. The company spokesperson said they expect to get FDA clearance for the vaccine in the first half of next year.
This joint project of Sanofi and GSK has a total of 440 healthy volunteers in the trials across 11 investigational sites in the US. The vaccine candidate is designed with Sanofi’s recombinant protein- based technology of seasonal influenza conjointly with pandemic adjuvant technology and aims to produce 1 billion doses in 2021.
Thomas Triomphe, executive vice president and global head of Sanofi Pasteur, said in a statement that their dedicated team are incessantly working and believe that the results of phase 1 and 2 will play a key role in proceeding to the third phase, possibly by the end of the year.
The US government granted $2.1 bn in July to boost up the vaccine development process, where the two pharma companies would provide US with 100 doses of the treatment.