Uni­ver­si­ty of Queens­land shuts down Covid-19 vac­cine pro­gram af­ter ob­serv­ing in­ter­fer­ence with HIV tests

On the same day the FDA held an his­toric hear­ing on Pfiz­er and BioN­Tech’s Covid-19 vac­cine, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Queens­land and CSL ter­mi­nat­ed their pro­gram on the oth­er side of the globe, mark­ing the first ma­jor coro­n­avirus vac­cine ef­fort to fail.

The part­ners have de­cid­ed not to ad­vance their vac­cine can­di­date in­to Phase II/III tri­als af­ter dis­cov­er­ing that some par­tic­i­pants’ im­mune re­spons­es in­ter­fered with cer­tain HIV tests. Re­searchers not­ed they ruled out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the vac­cine caus­es HIV in­fec­tion, which was con­firmed by rou­tine fol­low-ups.

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