The German company BioNTech and the American pharmaceutical group Pfizer announced on Thursday that they have successfully completed the second phase of trials of a combination vaccine that was created to fight the flu and the Covid-19 disease, inform AFP and Agerpres.

Pfizer-BioNTech vaccinePhoto: Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times/Shutterstock Editorial/Profimedia

The clinical trials aimed to demonstrate the “safety, tolerability and immunogenicity” of the new messenger RNA-based product “in healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 64,” the Pfizer-BioNTech alliance said.

The vaccine “has the potential to mitigate the impact of two respiratory diseases with a single injection and could simplify vaccination practices for providers, patients and healthcare systems worldwide,” said Annalisa Anderson, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer, as quoted in statement

“Combination vaccines can become the basis of routine vaccination against respiratory diseases, especially for vaccination of populations at risk of developing severe forms,” ​​added BioNTech CEO and co-founder Ugur Sahin.

Both companies want to start phase 3 clinical trials “in the coming months”, the last stage to be completed before the vaccine could be brought to market.

And other companies, such as the American Moderna and Novavax, are working on the development of a combined vaccine.

BioNTech announces it will have to cut the cost of its Covid-19 vaccine stocks due to falling demand

In 2020, BioNTech and Pfizer were able to quickly and successfully create the world’s first vaccine against Covid-19, generating billions of dollars in revenue for the two companies.

The German biotech laboratory, founded in 2008, was the first pharmaceutical company in the world to have a vaccine based on messenger RNA technology approved in a large number of countries as late as 2020, just months after the coronavirus outbreak. pandemic.

The German company benefited from an impressive increase in its earnings in the 2021 and 2022 financial years, a period that ended with the end of the public health emergency caused by the virus that causes the disease Covid-19 and its variants.

BioNTech recently announced that it will have to write down the cost of its Covid-19 vaccine stock by €900 million due to reduced demand for the product.