What happens next, as coronavirus vaccine trials move to a new phase?

Teams from China, Britain, the US and Germany have shown their potential products are safe but there’s still a long way to go

Broad testing across a diverse range – including elderly and less healthy subjects – is crucial to assessing how a vaccine might work on a population

Reading Time:4 minutes

A volunteer participates in the vaccine trial in Oxford, England on July 7. In research published on Monday in the journal Lancet, scientists said that they found their experimental Covid-19 vaccine produced a dual immune response in people aged 18 to 55. Photo: University of Oxford via AP

Published: 11:00pm, 21 Jul 2020Updated: 8:51pm, 25 Nov 2020

The race for a Covid-19 vaccine has taken on critical importance as the disease continues to charge through the global population, with more than a million new infections every week and the death toll climbing.

The vaccine has been seen as a way out of the crisis and new results from some of the teams leading development are showing early promising signs. But the real test lies ahead in the final-phase trials, experts say.

The new data out on Monday includes results from a vaccine candidate produced by a team at Oxford University, working in partnership with British firm AstraZeneca.

The candidate was found to be safe and induced strong immune responses in combined phase-one and phase-two trials, published in The Lancet scientific journal.

A candidate from Chinese biopharmaceutical company CanSino Biologics, produced in collaboration with the Chinese military, was also found to be safe and able to produce an immune response in most candidates, according to results from phase-two trials, also published in The Lancet on Monday.

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