According to the manufacturer, the vaccine also shows good effectiveness against the Omikron variant.
(Photo: dpa)
Frankfurt The Covid-19 booster vaccination from the US company Moderna increases protection against the rapidly spreading Omikron variant. As the company reports after preliminary investigation data, the booster vaccination with 50 micrograms increases the omicron-neutralizing antibody level by 37 times compared to double vaccinations without a booster. For the study, the sera obtained from the blood were analyzed by 20 test subjects.
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel rates these data as “encouraging”. The booster vaccination with Moderna is also approved in Germany.
Regardless of the test data, Moderna wants to continue to develop a vaccine tailored to the Omikron variant, as Bancel emphasized. “The dramatic increase in Covid-19 cases with the Omikron variant is worrying for everyone,” said the CEO.
The omicron variant of Sars-CoV-2 was only identified at the end of November. It has up to 36 mutations in the virus’ spike protein. With the help of this protein, the virus can penetrate human cells and multiply there. Because of these changes, the present vaccines are far less effective against this new variant of the coronavirus.
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The antibody response against the omicron variant is significantly reduced compared to other mutations such as the currently most widespread variant Delta after two vaccinations with the mRNA vaccines from Biontech and Moderna, as various studies show. After the additional booster vaccination, the effectiveness against the new variant increases significantly, as the new figures from Moderna now show. The booster vaccination campaigns are therefore being promoted worldwide.
At the beginning of December, Biontech published preliminary study data on the effectiveness of its booster vaccination against the Omikron variant. Thereafter, after receiving a third vaccination with the Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty, the neutralizing antibody levels against the Omikron strain are increased by 25 times. The effectiveness against the Omikron variant after the booster vaccination was thus roughly comparable to the effectiveness of the double vaccination against the virus of origin called “wild type”, which broke out for the first time in December 2019 in Wuhan, China.
“These initial data suggest that a booster vaccination can still offer adequate protection against illness of any severity caused by the Omicron variant,” said Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of Biontech at the time. Data on the longevity of the antibody titers induced by the booster are currently still being collected.
New vaccine: Moderna wants to go into the test phase in early 2022
In the study now presented, Moderna also had the protection of a double booster vaccination and other, as yet unapproved vaccines tested. Further groups of 20 subjects each received a dose of 100 micrograms of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine as well as various doses of modified vaccines that were also adapted to the beta and gamma variants of the virus. A variant of the Moderna booster adapted to Omikron is to go into the test phase at the beginning of next year.
As the preliminary results further show, after the booster dose of 100 micrograms of the Moderna vaccine, the omicron-neutralizing antibody levels increased 83-fold compared to the antibody level before the booster vaccination. According to Moderna, the modified vaccines showed comparable results.
The US virologist Anthony Fauci, who also advises US President Joe Biden, had published data on booster vaccinations with the vaccine from Moderna last week. According to him, these showed that the third vaccination would produce enough antibodies to neutralize the virus. Accordingly, the antibody levels in the laboratory have risen twenty-fold after the booster vaccination. Despite the new Omikron coronavirus variant, Fauci does not consider the development of an adapted vaccine to be necessary for the time being.
Nevertheless, in addition to Moderna, other manufacturers are already working on vaccines adapted to the Omikron variant, including Biontech and Pfizer. Biontech boss Sahin had already expressed the assessment at a conference at the beginning of December that a modified vaccine would probably be required at some point. The question is how urgently this is needed. Sahin also considers Omikron to be a so-called antibody escape variant. “This means that this variant may be able to infect people who have been vaccinated.”
Pfizer and Biontech had already started developing an Omikron-specific Covid-19 vaccine at the end of November. Based on their previous experience, the companies are confident that they will be able to deliver a vaccine adapted to the Omikron variant in March 2022 if necessary.
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