Fierce JPM Week: Will the first COVID-19 vaccines deter future launches? Not at all, experts say

Typically in drug and vaccine development, first-to-market products command a big advantage that can deter follow-up products. Not so with COVID-19 vaccines, experts said Tuesday. There’s still plenty of need for new entrants. Even as the first COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca are deploying in the U.S. and other countries, more programs will need to succeed to vaccinate the entire world, Swati Gupta, Ph.D., vice president and head of emerging infectious diseases and scientific strategy at IAVI, said on a Fierce JPM Week panel. IAVI, a nonprofit research group, is partnered with Merck & Co. on an early-stage candidate based on the same technology used in Merck's Ebola vaccine. The ongoing COVID-19 vaccine launches will hopefully “help us to end the acute phase of the pandemic,” Gupta said, but, because COVID-19 is likely to become endemic, “we also need to plan for longer-term management of the disease.”