Four vaccine platforms will be tested in the conduct of the World Health Organization (WHO) Solidarity Trial in the Philippines, local lead investigators said on Friday, Dec. 17.
The four vaccine types that will be studied in the trial are subunit (example of which is the Novavax vaccine), DNA, intranasal, and mRNA (like the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna), said Dr. Issa Alejandria, one of the lead investigators in the WHO Solidarity trial in the Philippines.
Alejandria said that subunit and DNA vaccine types are currently included in the Solidarity trial.
“Hopefully, we will have an intranasal vaccine in the trial and then we’re looking also at having another mRNA vaccine but the storage requirement is less stringent than the current mRNA vaccines that we have and this might be a single dose,” said Alejandria.
“Those are something to look forward to. But currently, what we have is the subunit vaccine and a DNA vaccine,” she added.
The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) officially announced the conduct of the WHO Solidarity trial on Friday, Dec. 17. However, Alejandria said that the trial already started last September.
There are more than 5,000 participants enrolled in this trial in the Philippines.
“We just had a pilot/soft start Sept. 30 with one site. We have not reached yet our target of 15,000 participants. We still need participants,” said Alejandria.
“Our study participants, we're recruiting healthy participants---16 years old and above,” she added.
Dr. Jodor Lim, who is also serving as a lead investigator in the local trial, said “one of the requirements for this study is that they should not have been vaccinated with any COVID-19 vaccine as well as they have not been infected with the virus---laboratory confirmed.”
Lim said that some of their participants were from Metro Manila. However, they are eyeing to recruit more participants outside of the metropolis.
“You will see that in NCR, a lot of areas now---the vaccine coverage is very good already. So what we need to do is look for areas outside of NCR where we will move to,” he said.
“We realized when we do our community engagement, when we go to the sites we're engaged with---through our local government units and city health officers---we realized that there's still communities that are not yet vaccinated. So these are the ones we engage, recruit to our clinical trials,” said Alejandria.
Meanwhile, WHO Country Representative to the Philippines Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe expressed his gratitude to the country for participating in this global effort.