British-Swedish pharma giant AstraZeneca Plc's coronavirus vaccine could run an extra global trial as the drugmaker tries to straighten out dubiety and confusion around favourable results in its current study.
The company is hoping for the new test to substantiate the 90 per cent efficacy rate the inoculation demonstrated in a portion of an ongoing trial, AstraZeneca's CEO Pascal Soriot told Bloomberg.
The drugmaker is in favour of that option instead of adding an arm to a separate study that's already afoot in the United States (US).
Questions are mounting after AstraZeneca recognised that a lower dosage level that emerged as more effective resulted from a manufacturing disparity.
The drugmaker and its partner, the University of Oxford, initially didn't reveal the error and other important details, leading to concerns over their transparency.
"Now that we've found what looks like a better efficacy, we have to validate this, so we need to do an additional study," Soriot told bloomberg.
He added that it will possibly be another "international study, but this one could be faster because we know the efficacy is high so we need a smaller number of patients."
Soriot further told the news agency that he didn't expect the additional clinical trial to delay regulatory approvals in the UK and European Union.
The UK government on Friday, November 27, said it had asked the medicines regulator to review if the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine was fitting and appropriate for temporary authorisation.
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