Glaxo’s Covid-19 effort progresses, this time thanks to Medicago

Glaxosmithkline, one of the world’s largest vaccine makers but absent from the first wave of Covid-19 jabs, confirmed this week that it has a chance of playing a role in the tail of the pandemic. Two novel vaccines are now at the pivotal stage. The first is partnered with Sanofi and the second with Medicago, with Glaxo providing the adjuvant for both. These projects are being developed with the market for booster shots in mind. High immune response after a single dose in patients with prior infection shows strong booster potential, Sanofi and Glaxo said of their candidate. Canada’s Medicago, which released phase 2 data yesterday, pointed to strong neutralising antibody responses and the potential for a potent, adjuvanted vaccine to provide cross-protection against emerging variants. The biggest challenge for these efforts arguably lies in recruiting patients for placebo-controlled phase 3 trials in regions where existing vaccines are readily available; the developers have laid out seemingly ambitious predictions for progress, with both promising data well before the end of this year. Glaxo also has a stake in two other major pending vaccine readouts, from Curevac and Novavax, so the UK pharma giant will enter the front line of the pandemic sooner or later.