Candidate: Vaccine to protect against COVID-19

Category: VAX

Type: Adjuvanted vaccine combining Medigen’s stable prefusion form of the SARS-CoV-2 recombinant spike protein—under a global license from the U.S. Vaccine Research Center at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—with Dynavax’s adjuvant CpG 1018™, the adjuvant contained in Dynavax’s FDA-approved adult hepatitis B vaccine.

Status: Dynavax said August 13 it was awarded a $3.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation toward scaling up production batch size to allow for increased capacity of Dynavax’s CpG 1018 advanced adjuvant. That effort will support capacity of up to 750 million adjuvant doses annually, which can be further increased if needed, according to the company.

Medigen and Dynavax on July 23 announced their collaboration to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. In preclinical testing, the companies said, the combination of Medigen’s vaccine candidate and Dynavax’s adjuvant generated virus neutralizing antibody responses and cellular immunity that was sufficiently “strong” to support advancing the vaccine candidate into Phase I trials, Medigen CEO Charles Chen stated. The Phase I study is expected to start in September.


COVID-19: 200 Candidates and Counting

To navigate through the >200 potential therapeutic and vaccine options for COVID-19, GEN has grouped the candidates into four broad categories based on their developmental and (where applicable) clinical progress:

FRONT RUNNER – the most promising therapeutics/vaccines based on clinical progress, favorable data or both.

DEFINITELY MAYBE – earlier phases with promising partners, or more advanced candidates in development that have generated uneven data.

KEEPING AN EYE ON… – interesting technology, attracting notable partners, or both, but preliminary data.

TOO SOON TO TELL – longshots pending additional experimental and/or clinical data.

GEN has also tagged the most common treatment types:

● ANTIVIRAL
● VAX
● ANTIBODY
● RNA

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