The shares of Novavax Inc. they jumped more than 20% in trading after Thursday’s schedule, after the company revealed the results of studies that showed its proposed COVID-19 vaccine is nearly 90% effective overall, but much less effective against a new variant.
In a phase 3 trial in the UK, the Novavax NVAX,
the vaccine showed 89.3% overall efficacy, but less protection against new variants. Novavax revealed that the original vaccine was 95.6% effective against the most common form of COVID-19 and 85.6% effective against the new strain originally identified in the UK.
A phase 2b trial in South Africa showed that the vaccine was slightly less than 50% effective against a new variant originally identified in that country. After the 49.4% efficacy against the new variant led to an overall number of 60% in this trial, Novavax said it would begin developing a new vaccine specifically targeted at this variant, which was found in the United States by first time Thursday.
“One of the main advantages of our adjuvanted platform is that it uses a very small amount of antigen, allowing the rapid creation and large-scale production of combined vaccine candidates that could face multiple circulating strains of COVID-19,” said Novavax’s president of research and development, Gregory Glenn said in Thursday’s announcement. “Combined with the safety profile observed in our studies so far with our COVID-19 vaccine, as well as in previous influenza studies, we are optimistic about our ability to adapt quickly to evolving conditions. “.
Shares originally rose more than 10% in out-of-hours operations after the news was published, but soon turned around and rose more than 20%. Shares gained 2.2% on Thursday from regular trading and rose more than 1,700% last year, as did the S&P 500 SPX index.
has increased by 14.5%.
Novavax is still conducting additional studies in the United States and Mexico. Executives were scheduled to discuss more of the findings at a conference call at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday.