Coronavirus vaccine update: Which potential Covid-19 vaccine will be easy to store, ship

Coronavirus Covid-19 vaccine update, tracker: The race to develop a safe and effective vaccine against Coronavirus was headlined by Oxford-AstraZeneca, Russian Sputnik-V, and Chinese vaccine candidates. However, two announcements in November has completely changed the scenario as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s experimental vaccines have become the frontrunner with encouraging interim results pertaining to safety and efficacy. Now, the question arises which vaccine will be easy to store and distribute since these two are pivotal factors other than the development of the vaccine itself.

November 9, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla announced that Pfizer-BioNTech’s experimental Coronavirus vaccine candidate BNT162b2 was found to be over 90 per cent effective in preventing Coronavirus in volunteers who took part in the clinical trial. Bourla, however, mentioned that the data required to get approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization, was scheduled to be declared by the third week of November. On November 16, Moderna has disclosed the interim results from a late-stage human trial of its experimental vaccine candidate mRNA-1273. The results have shown that Moderna’s potential Covid-19 vaccine is 94.5 per cent effective in preventing Coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Pfizer has launched a pilot delivery program for its experimental Coronavirus vaccine in several parts of the US. The decision was taken as the drugmaker is keen to resolve distribution issues due to the ultra-cold storage requirements of the potential Covid-19 vaccine. Four states in the US that have been chosen for the pilot project are Texas, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and New Mexico, as per a Reuters report.

With Pfizer’s BNT162b2 Coronavirus vaccine requiring ultra-cold storage, Moderna’s mRNA-1273’s stability at ordinary refrigerators controlled temperatures can become useful during distribution in far-off areas.

Moderna’s vaccine mRNA-1273 has the capacity to remain stable for up to six months if it is stored at a temperature of minus 20 degrees Celsius (-4 F) during the shipping. Minus 20 degrees Celsius (-4 F) is around home freezer levels. This gives Moderna’s mRNA-1273 an edge as the experimental vaccine can be distributed utilizing existing storage infrastructure and cold-chain shipping. Moderna has also said that it was execting mRNA-1273 would remain stable if stored at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius for 30 days. It has also said that the potential vaccine will be distributed in 10-dose vials and these vials can be kept for 12 hours at room temperature, according to the Reuters report.

Pfizer’s potential vaccine candidate can be shipped and stored for up to 6 months at minus 70 degrees Celsius (-94 F). However, it can also be stored at standard refrigerator temperatures for up to five days, the Reuters report said.

Notably, both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s experimental vaccines are using a new technology called synthetic messenger Ribonucleic acid (RNA) in order to activate the immune system against the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that causes the Covid-19.