The European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced on Thursday that it has approved the use as a booster dose of a new generation vaccine against COVID-19 developed by the French company Sanofi and its British partner GSK against the new coronavirus, Reuters and Agerpres reported.
This vaccine, called VidPrevtyn Beta, will be given as a booster dose to people over 18 years of age who have already received a primary vaccination regimen based on other COVID-19 sera approved on the European market, such as messenger RNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. and vaccines with viral vectors developed by AstraZeneca and Johnson&Johnson, the EMA said in a statement.
According to Reuters, the vaccine, approved on Thursday by the EMA, is based on proteins obtained in the Sanofi laboratory and an auxiliary ingredient provided by GSK that enhances the immune response.
The Sanofi-GSK vaccine contains proteins on the surface of the beta variant of the new coronavirus, which was first identified in South Africa in mid-2020 and was later replaced in 2021 by the Delta variant and later by the Omicron variant.
Sanofi was a latecomer to the Covid vaccine market
After analyzing the results of the clinical trials, the EMA announced that the booster dose of VidPrevtyn Beta is at least as effective as the dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in restoring protection against COVID-19.
Research into a vaccine against COVID-19 by Sanofi and GSK, two of the world’s largest vaccine makers, has been delayed several times.
In 2020, their first-generation vaccine candidate did not provide the desired level of protection in the elderly. The two partners then turned to fighting the beta variant of the new coronavirus, a decision that required additional research that took several months.
The dominant manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccine market, the Pfizer-BioNTech alliance and Moderna, have further strengthened their leading positions in the European and US markets after launching booster vaccines specifically designed to combat the Omicron variant.
In February of this year, Sanofi announced that it would seek approval of its protein vaccine in the EU and the US.
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