German pharmaceutical company BioNTech says it has begun testing a potential vaccine for the new coronavirus on volunteers.'s company BioNTech, which is working with US-based Pfizer, said on Wednesday that 12 participants of a clinical trial in Germany have received doses of the vaccine candidate BNT162 since April 23.
BioNTech said in a statement that in a next step, it will begin increasing the dose of BNT162 in a trial involving about 200 participants aged 18 to 55.BioNTech's work focuses on messenger RNA which speed up the process for mass-inoculation.GlaxoSmithKline, the world's largest vaccine maker, said the global push to develop an immunisation against the coronavirus would not lead to widely available products before the second half of next year.
This would require swift progress in global development efforts to show an experimental vaccine is safe, effective and dosed in the right way, she added. More than 70 global vaccine development projects are underway as economies across the globe are burdened by restrictions on movement to slow the spread of the disease.