Valneva says its booster works as a follow up to its own COVID-19 shot

Valneva said yesterday its COVID-19 vaccine candidate was efficient as a booster for people who had received the same shot as an initial vaccination.

“Initial results confirm that VLA2001 significantly boosted immunity in participants who received VLA2001 as a primary vaccination,” it said in a statement.

The news comes almost two weeks after a British study showed VLA2001 was the only shot out of seven that offered no immunity boost when given to people previously immunised with Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

“The company is preparing to launch a dedicated heterologous booster trial, which will evaluate a VLA2001 booster shot provided at least six months after primary vaccination with other vaccines or following natural infection. This study is expected to commence in early 2022,” it said yesterday.

We are pleased to report our first booster data, confirming that VLA2001 significantly boosted immunity in participants who received VLA2001 as a primary vaccination and regardless of the initial neutralising antibody level at the time of boosting,” Juan Carlos Jaramillo, Chief Medical Officer, Valneva, said in the statement.

“Our teams are working diligently on our rolling review regulatory submissions so that we can quickly deploy our vaccine (…),” he added.

The European Union’s drug regulator said in early December it had started a rolling review of Valneva’s vaccine – which could speed up approval – weeks after the EU signed a supply deal with the company.

Unlike shots from Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax, Valneva’s exposes the immune system to the entire coronavirus, not just its spike protein.

Valneva has said it is hopeful its vaccine candidate would protect people against variants of the virus, adding it would test it specifically against Omicron.

Edits by EP News Bureau