On this day in 2020, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine entered phase 1 trials, making it the first COVID vaccine to do so. This came less than a week after the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. How was it possible for this to happen so quickly? The third part of the #ChemVsCOVID series, produced with the Royal Society of Chemistry, gives a brief overview of the prior work and what the phase 1 trials looked at.
Drug testing was in the news on Friday – though this time it wasn’t the usual sports doping headlines, but instead news of the clinical trial of a drug gone tragically wrong in France. Of the 90 people given the drug in a phase 1 clinical trial, one has been left with permanent brain damage, and another five are still hospitalised. What is a phase 1 clinical trial? That’s what this graphic aims to explain, as well as outlining the whole drug discovery process.
