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Summary
- Novavax share price soared more than 35 per cent after-hours on Nasdaq after vaccine indicated promising efficacy results.
- The stock of Novavax has already registered a gain of more than 1,800 per cent in the last 12 months.
Shares of Novavax Inc (NASDAQ:NVAX), the Maryland-headquartered vaccine maker, have advanced a little more than 35 per cent after its Covid-19 vaccine demonstrated 89 per cent efficacy. The efficacy of the vaccine has been recorded for the Phase 3 trials in the UK with 50 per cent of the cases attributable to newly-mutated virus and the rest to the pre-existing coronavirus.
(Image Source: © Kalkine Group 2021)
Shares witness heavy flight
Following the course of development, the shares of Novavax soared as much as 35.06 per cent on Friday, 29 January, to an after-hours high of $181 per share from the market price of $134.01 apiece. With such a massive spike in the share prices of Novavax, it will be pivotal to witness the opening at a time when the futures linked to benchmark indices are trading in the negative territory.
According to the data available with Nasdaq, the stock of Novavax touched an after-hours low of $111 on Friday, 29 January. Novavax share price has been on a rising run right after realising a bottom during the Covid-led crash. As on the basis of the closing price of 28 January 2021, the stock of Novavax stands with a cumulative yearly gain of more than 1,800 per cent.
Fourth vaccine in the UK
The Covid vaccine being developed by Novavax, NVX-CoV2373, is essentially a protein-based vaccine shot. The Novavax Covid vaccine has been formulated from the available genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 virus. The vaccine has been undergoing various studies pertaining to its efficacy and adverse effects in the Phase 3 trials in the UK and PREVENT-19 trial in the US and Mexico.
The protein-based vaccine has an efficacy of 89.3 per cent in the Phase 3 clinical trials held in the UK in partnership with the UK government’s Vaccines Taskforce. The clinical study conducted on the virus vaccine candidate of Novavax includes the efficacy assessment with the mutated virus strain during a period of high transmission.
The study administered in the Phase 3 clinical trials in the UK enrolled over 15,000 volunteers with nearly 27 per cent of the participants over the age of 65 years from the age group of between 18 and 84 years. The first interim analysis of the vaccine is based on 62 volunteers, of which 32 people were found infected with the new variant of virus, 24 with a non-variant and 6 unknowns.
The efficacy of the vaccine was calculated to be 95.6 per cent against the original strain of coronavirus and 85.6 per cent against the mutated variant of virus first identified in the UK. Additionally, the efficacy of the vaccine candidate has arrived at more than 90 per cent in the clinical Phase 2b trials in South Africa. The Novavax vaccine can be stored at temperatures between 2°C and 8°C.
The vaccine being developed by Novavax is the first vaccine that has shown significant and high clinical efficacy against the newly emerged variants of the virus in the UK and South Africa, said Stanley C. Erck, President and chief executive at the pharma major.
