Armenia Takes Precautions as Coronavirus Arrives, US Biotech Run by Afeyan Working on Vaccine

Iran has been linked to most of the more than 200 confirmed cases of the virus now spread across the region, and many countries in and outside the Caucasus, Middle East, and Central Asia have imposed restrictions on travel to and from Iran in an effort to curtail the disease’s spread.

Neighboring Georgia and Azerbaijan reported infections this week, with three in each country.

One day after Armenian authorities reported the first such case, Pashinyan also urged Armenians to avoid nonessential travel to Italy and Turkey.

Armenia has nearly 1,000 laboratory test kits for detecting novel coronavirus and will get 2,000 more on March 6 Torosyan said in an interview with journalist Karlen Aslanyan.

“In addition, we negotiate with the UK and Russia. There are some offers also from China, Japan and the US. We are still considering if we should get new test kits, since up till now we received the test kits from our partners as assistance. It’s possible that there will be no need for new ones, because my prediction is that we are on the way of declining outbreaks with the exception of one-two countries. Many other specialist also share my prediction,” Torosyan said.

Moderna Therapeutics Working on Virus

Moderna Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech company co-founded by Noubar Afeyan, co-founder of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, has shipped the first batches of its COVID-19 vaccine, Time reports.

The vaccine was created just 42 days after the genetic sequence of the COVID-19 virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was released by Chinese researchers in mid-January.

The first vials were sent to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, which will ready the vaccine for human testing as early as April.

Moderna’s vaccine against COVID-19 was developed in record time because it’s based on a relatively new genetic method that does not require growing huge amounts of virus.

Instead, the vaccine is packed with mRNA, the genetic material that comes from DNA and makes proteins.

Moderna wins bragging rights as it kick-starts first experimental coronavirus clinical trial.

Moderna’s hope lays in its messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, mRNA-1273, which has been shipped out to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for a phase 1 test set to start as early as April.

This will be tested on several dozen healthy patients to assess safety and immune response.

“I want to thank the entire Moderna team for their extraordinary effort in responding to this global health emergency with record speed. The collaboration across Moderna, with NIAID, and with CEPI has allowed us to deliver a clinical batch in 42 days from sequence identification,” said Juan Andres, chief technical operations and quality officer at Moderna.

“This would not have been possible without our Norwood manufacturing site, which uses leading-edge technology to enable flexible operations and ensure high quality standards are met for clinical-grade material.”

On the news (which was first published by The Wall Street Journal), the unicorn biotech, which is predominately an early-stage company with much to prove, saw its shares shoot up more than 18% after-hours to around $19 a share, down from its heights of more than $24 at the start of the month (which then led to a public offering of its common shares).

Worldwide, the COVID-19 outbreak, which began in China, has infected more than 86,000 people and killed some 3,000.

Most of the deaths and infections have occurred in China, but the epidemic has spread elsewhere, with Iran becoming the hardest hit outside of mainland China.

(Reports from RFE/RL, Armenpress, Reuters, news.am and Fierce Biotech were used to compile this story.)