Moderna hits major milestone in COVID-19 vaccine trial

DELAND, Fla. - Biotech Company Moderna may very well win the race to become the approved COVID-19 vaccine, annonucing on Thursday a huge milestone in its research taking place in Central Florida.

The company said it has completed enrollment in its trial.

“We’ve very happy and thankful for all of those participants who came out,” Dr. Bruch Rankin, Medical Director, Accel Clinical Research.

Dr. Rankin said that’s a big deal, because it allows the trial to move forward. The White House is also very confident the United States is on the verge of an approved vaccine,

“We think we’re just a matter of months if not just one month from getting a vaccine safe to the market,” said Alyssa Farah, White House Director of Strategic Communications.

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Central Floridians may have already been injected with the cure. Moderna is testing its vaccine at a clinic in Deland.

The research director at Moderna's DeLand lab partner said that the trial has gone smoothly and none of the patients have experienced any unexpected side effects.

That could put Moderna ahead of the pack, again. Two of the four major pharmaceutical companies in the running were forced to pause their trials due to patients getting sick.

“Safety and efficacy are the two things that we always talk about and those are the two things we look for, and this trial has not had any outliers from our site,” said Dr. Rankin.

With enrollment over, the trials now move into the next phase.

“We go from a screening and dosing phase with the dosing into surveillance, all of those participants are now reporting if they’re having any flu-like, COVID-like symptoms and then we’re going into a testing phase, where we’ll monitor them for active illness,” said Dr. Rankin.

Moderna will be studying the results from the 30,000 participants.

“To see that there’s some signal there, showing that the vaccine is being effective, that’s being looked at internally now, they’ll need to have that good signal before they submit that to the FDA,” said Dr. Rankin.

That’s expected to happen by the end of the year.

Another round of COVID vaccine trials are about to get underway by other pharma companies, they’re looking for more volunteers at the Deland clinic. For more details, click here.