Medical Analytics Firm: COVID19 Vaccine to Take 5.2 Years to Develop with 5% Chance of Success
The pharmaceutical trade publication, Fierce Pharma, is a publication targeting investors in pharmaceutical products, such as vaccines. This week (April 2020) they published an article titled: Don’t count on a COVID-19 vaccine for at least five years, says AI-based forecast. Investors want to be assured that a new product does not get rushed to market too quickly, bypassing safety regulations, for obvious reasons. They have learned their lessons from previous products that gained FDA approval but later turned out to harm people, like the Merck VIOXX scandal in years passed, where up to 60,000 people are suspected of dying due to dangerous side effects of the drug, before it was pulled from the market. A company called Clarivate has developed an analytical tool called Cortellis Analytics which apparently uses artificial intelligence to predict how long it will take to bring a certain drug to market. Fierce Pharma reports: "Using a tool it developed called Cortellis Analytics, Clarivate estimated that Moderna has just a 5% probability of success with its COVID-19 vaccine mRNA-1273, and that the time window for approval would be 5.2 years. The low probability of success reflects the fact that mRNA is a new, unproven approach to vaccines, said Sarah Hardison, Ph.D., head of product, regulatory and pharmacovigilance at Clarivate, in an email." Clarivate isn’t the only firm raising questions about the growing optimism that a solution to COVID-19 will rescue everyone from their quarantines soon. Analysts at SVB Leerink spoke to a vaccine development-specialist earlier this month and warned in a report to investors that “safety is often more important than efficacy to regulators, and long-term safety must be established before” a vaccine will be approved.