While dis­cus­sions sur­round­ing Covid-19 vac­cines among lead­ers in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­dus­try have re­volved around the near-cer­tain need for boost­ers, sci­en­tists re­port­ed that the Pfiz­er/BioN­Tech and Mod­er­na vac­cines may pro­tect against the virus for years.

The find­ings were pub­lished in Na­ture on Mon­day and add to the the­o­ry that those who have been im­mu­nized with mR­NA vac­cines might not need boost­ers, de­pend­ing on the sever­i­ty of the mu­ta­tions of the virus. The study didn’t ex­am­ine J&J’s vac­cine.

A re­port from Ali Ellebedy in May found that the im­mune cells that rec­og­nize the virus sit in­ac­tive in bone mar­row for at least eight months af­ter in­fec­tion, and that same re­port al­so found that those who have re­ceived a vac­cine but nev­er be­came in­fect­ed with the virus would like­ly need a boost­er shot in the fu­ture. An­oth­er study said that mem­o­ry B cells ma­ture and strength­en for at least a year af­ter in­fec­tion, The New York Times re­port­ed.

Ellebedy’s study con­sist­ed of 41 peo­ple, eight of whom had been pre­vi­ous­ly in­fect­ed by Covid-19, who re­ceived both jabs of the Pfiz­er/BioN­Tech vac­cine. Sci­en­tists ex­tract­ed lymph node sam­ples in 14 pa­tients from as long as 15 weeks af­ter the pa­tients’ first dose of the shot. The team found that the num­ber of mem­o­ry cells that rec­og­nized the virus re­mained the same, and the ger­mi­nal cen­ter was ac­tive in all of the pa­tients.

“Usu­al­ly by four to six weeks, there’s not much left,” Deep­ta Bhat­tacharya, an im­mu­nol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, told the Times. But ger­mi­nal cen­ters stim­u­lat­ed by the mR­NA vac­cines are “still go­ing, months in­to it, and not a lot of de­cline in most peo­ple.”

As­traZeneca back on track for vac­cine de­liv­er­ies

Af­ter some de­lays, As­traZeneca is on sched­ule to pro­vide Covid-19 vac­cines to coun­tries in South­east Asia, Reuters re­port­ed Mon­day.

Thai­land will re­ceive its quo­ta of 6 mil­lion dos­es by the end of June, and ex­ports will start in ear­ly Ju­ly. As­traZeneca said that Siam Bio­science will pro­duce 180 mil­lion jabs this year.

Siam is owned by Thai­land’s king Ma­ha Va­ji­ra­longko­rn. It is that com­pa­ny’s first time mak­ing a vac­cine, and ques­tions sur­round­ing pro­duc­tion tar­gets are sen­si­tive, be­cause pub­lish­ing the monar­chy is pun­ish­able by 15 years in prison in Thai­land.

Last week, the drug­mak­er gave 1.8 mil­lion dos­es to the Thai gov­ern­ment, but de­liv­er­ies to the Philip­pines and Tai­wan both were de­layed.

As­traZeneca vac­cine proved strong re­sponse against coro­n­avirus a year af­ter jab: re­port

As­traZeneca’s vac­cine, pro­duced through a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ox­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, pro­vid­ed “strong im­mune re­sponse” for up to a year fol­low­ing a sin­gle dose or third boost­er shot, the com­pa­ny an­nounced Mon­day.

A pa­per pub­lished by Ox­ford in The Lancet found that an­ti­body lev­els stayed above the base­line for at least a year af­ter a sin­gle dose, and a third dose of vaxzevria giv­en at least six months af­ter the sec­ond dose in­creased an­ti­body lev­els six-fold, and helped fight off the Al­pha, Be­ta and Delta vari­ants of the virus.

An­drew Pol­lard, di­rec­tor of the Ox­ford Vac­cine Group, said that the re­sponse to a sec­ond dose was “ex­cel­lent,” es­pe­cial­ly af­ter a 10-month de­lay from the first shot.

Pa­tients in the study were be­tween 18 and 55 years old, and had ei­ther re­ceived one or both dos­es of vaxzevria.

Vaxzevria us­es a repli­ca­tion-de­fi­cient chim­panzee vi­ral vec­tor based on a week­end ver­sion of an ade­n­ovirus. It’s been grant­ed emer­gency use au­tho­riza­tion in 80 coun­tries.

For a look at all End­points News coro­n­avirus sto­ries, check out our spe­cial news chan­nel.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Health Committee ranking member Richard Burr and other top Republicans are questioning the Biden administration’s decision to get out in front of the FDA and announce that Covid-19 vaccine boosters would be ready for administration by this week.

While Burr praised the FDA’s EUA for the boosters Wednesday evening, the Republicans earlier in the day called on White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeffrey Zients to release an updated strategy on leveraging vaccines to end the pandemic and to clarify what exactly happened with the premature announcement on the boosters.

When Thomas Braun was starting out as a young professor at Germany’s University of Würzburg in 1997, he decided to try his hand at a new field: heart regeneration, a sci-fi-esque premise that could offer a way to treat patients recovering from a heart attack. He thought it would take a few years before they got results.

“We were,” he acknowledges now, “rather naïve.”

But on Thursday, after two and a half decades of fitful starts and abandoned leads, Braun and a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute showed that they could reprogram heart cells in mice and get the animals to regenerate cardiac tissue after a heart attack. The breakthrough, published in Science, adds new evidence that it will eventually be possible to help patients recover muscle lost in heart attacks and gives another boon to anti-aging researchers who want to one day apply these rejuvenation techniques across much of the body.

In an attempt to get its house of accelerated approvals in order, the FDA is holding its second adcomm of 2021 to review cancer drugs that won accelerated approvals but failed to confirm clinical benefit in subsequent trials or have taken a long time to read those data out.

On Dec. 2, the FDA’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee will review two accelerated approvals from Secura Bio’s Farydak (panobinostat), a third-line multiple myeloma drug, and Acrotech Biopharma’s Marqibo, as a third-line drug for adult patients with Philadelphia chromosome negative acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Both drugs have been marketed for more than five years under their accelerated approvals but have recorded negligible sales in their respective indications in recent years.

The Biden administration’s goal of kicking off its booster shot drive for the entire US population this week is not quite going as planned.

First, Pfizer applied for approval of a supplemental application for the booster shots, but since last Friday’s adcomm reviewing them, the plan has devolved into an EUA, which the FDA issued late Wednesday evening.

The population that is now eligible for the booster, six months after receiving the first pair of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, also narrowed from what Pfizer applied for (everyone who’s eligible for the initial Pfizer shots) to just those who are 65 or older, or at high-risk of a Covid infection, including health care workers and others with occupational hazards.