Merck is joining the ranks of pharmaceutical companies that have a COVID-19 vaccine candidate in clinical development. Merck will move its candidate into clinical trials in the third quarter of this year, the company announced this morning.
The move to Phase I comes weeks after the company closed its acquisition of Austria-based Themis, which has a pipeline of vaccine candidates and immune-modulatory therapies. Merck jumped into the vaccine development program with its May acquisition of the company, which is developing V591, a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate that uses a measles virus vector platform based on a vector originally developed by scientists at the Institut Pasteur.
