PARIS (Reuters) – French drugmaker Sanofi and its British partner GlaxoSmithKline said on Wednesday a single booster dose of their recombinant adjuvanted COVID-19 vaccine candidate delivered consistently strong immune responses.
“The booster was well tolerated, with a safety profile similar to currently approved COVID-19 vaccines. This is the most comprehensive booster trial to date to explore boosting across different vaccine technologies used for primary vaccination”, the two companies said in a statement.
At the end of September, Sanofi dropped its plans for its own mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine because of the dominance achieved by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna in using the technology to fight the pandemic.
Sanofi is hoping for a comeback after falling behind rivals in the race for COVID-19 shots with a vaccine candidate based on the more conventional protein-based approach.
“The ongoing global Phase 3 trial … includes regular reviews by an independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB). During its last review, the DSMB identified no safety concerns and recommended the trial to continue into early 2022 to accrue more data,” the companies said.
(Reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten; Editing by Tom Hogue)
