BMJ article: Covid-19: Moderna plans booster doses to counter variants
In the first approach Moderna said that it would see whether a third “booster dose” of the current mRNA-1273 vaccine added to the approved two dose regimen would further increase neutralising titres against the emerging variants.
In a second approach the company said that it had developed a booster vaccine candidate called mRNA-1273.351 against the emerging South African variant. It said that it was beginning phase I studies in the US to see whether this modified vaccine with variant specific proteins would increase the immunological effect.
In an interview with The BMJ earlier this month Andrew Pollard, a leader of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine trials, explained that modifying the vaccine was not complicated. “For the RNA vaccines and the viral vectors it’s relatively straightforward, because you just have to synthesise a new bit of DNA in our case—or RNA in [the Pfizer and Moderna] cases—and then insert that into the new vaccine. Then there’s a bit of work to do to manufacture the new vaccine, which is a reasonably heavy lift. But the same processes would be used.”
It’s an article rather than a paper, so it’s aimed at the lay reader.
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