Three new drug companies join the COVIDRIVE consortium to study vaccine effectiveness

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Mar 8 2022

Three new drug companies (Moderna, Novavax and Valneva) have joined the COVIDRIVE consortium, becoming partners of this project coordinated by the Vaccine Research Department of the Foundation for the Promotion of Health and Biomedical Research of Valencia Region (Fisabio), an affiliate of the Conselleria de Sanitat Universal i Salut Pública, along with the company specialized in pharmacovigilance and epidemiology, P95.

In total, there are now 11 partners that form part of the consortium that studies the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in Europe, including public institutions, small and medium companies and pharmaceutical companies. With this recent incorporation, the project features the collaboration of 8 of the 9 companies with a COVID-19 vaccine authorized or that is a candidate in the European Union.

It is crucial to promote international studies that generate precise and constant information in real time about the effectiveness of the different COVID-19 vaccines. This monitoring is even more important in the current context with the appearance of new variants, the administration of booster doses and the authorization of new Covid-19 vaccines in the upcoming months."

Dr. Antonio Carmona, scientific coordinator of the COVIDRIVE project

"With the inclusion of these three new pharmaceutical companies," adds Dr. Carmona, "COVIDRIVE will be capable of covering the study of the effectiveness of the complete spectrum of COVID-19 vaccines, from those based on messenger RNA (Moderna) to those comprised of the inactive virus (Valneva), to viral vector vaccines (AstraZeneca and Janssen) and recombinant protein vaccines (Novavax and Sanofi Pasteur/GSK), increasing the scientific importance of its results."

COVIDRIVE was founded as a public-private collaboration from an already existing platform to study the seasonal flu vaccines (DRIVE, a project that is also coordinated by the Vaccine Research Department of the Fisabio Foundation).

Over 50 hospitals from 13 European countries are participating on this platform. Four of these hospitals are from the Valencian Community: Hospital Universitario Dr. Peset, Hospital General Universitario de Castellón, Hospital Marina Baixa and Hospital Universitario y Politécnico La Fe. These four centers provide hospital data to COVIDRIVE through the respiratory disease vigilance network of the Valencian Community (VAHNSI).

"Generating data on effectiveness in the real world will help make decisions to design Covid-19 vaccination strategies in the upcoming years, and in the short-term, it will help better implement the booster doses," emphasized the researcher in Fisabio's Vaccine Research Department (AIV, for its acronym in Spanish).